DisCoTec conference 2026, Urbino, Italy (Oliver Pearce)

 By Oliver Pearce


Last month I was lucky enough to attend the DisCoTec conference in Urbino, Italy, hosted by the University of Urbino Carlo Bo from the 8th to the 12th of June.

DisCoTec is a series of three federated conferences under one roof — COORDINATION, DAIS and FORTE — covering a wide range of distributed computing topics.

I attended the conference to present my first publication, RustMC: Automated verification of real-world concurrent Rust at FORTE. RustMC is a stateless model checker that works at the LLVM-IR level. Operating on an intermediate representation allows the tool to detect concurrency bugs across the Rust/C FFI boundary where Rust's compiler-enforced safety guarantees no longer hold. To create the tool we had to account for Rust's unique compilation strategy, implementing support for the interception of threading functions, promotion of LLVM memory intrinsics and handling of uninitialised memory.

I'd presented RustMC at the Rust Verification workshop a few months ago but this was my first time presenting my work at a conference and despite some nerves the talk went well! I've since used the tool to identify a previously undiscovered bug in the popular event-listener crate (linked here).

The city was beautiful enough to make up for my long journey: a tube to Heathrow, a flight to Bologna, a train to Pesaro and a bus into town. Urbino is a recognised UNESCO world heritage site with some stunning examples of Renaissance architecture, and it's the birthplace of the Renaissance painter and architect Raphael. If you ever find yourself there, I highly recommend visiting his childhood home.

Roberto Bruni's DisCoTec-wide keynote, A logic for all reasons was the standout of the week for me. The talk gave a fantastic overview of Hoare logic, incorrectness logic, sufficient incorrectness logic and the automatic inference of necessary preconditions for program correctness. The unified framework for representing these logics feels like a real step forward, and should make it easier to combine different approaches to provide a more comprehensive view of a program.

I'd like to commend all the conference organisers and attendees for creating such a friendly, welcoming atmosphere where a lot of the discussions between talks were as interesting and productive as the sessions themselves. I hope to meet some of the people I met again at future conferences.

Overall I had a fantastic time at DisCoTec and I came away having learned a huge amount. I'd like to thank the organisers, participants and student helpers for all their hard work.









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