Building Safety-Critical APIs: A Guide to Linear Types and Austral Implementation

1. Introduction to the Linear Paradigm in API Design In the design of safety-critical systems, the management of resource lifecycles represents the primary vector for catastrophic failure. Traditional API design relies heavily on "implicit lifecycles"—a reliance on programmer discipline to ensure that resources like memory, file handles, and sockets are acquired and released in the correct order. This approach is fundamentally fragile. The strategic shift toward the linear paradigm moves these g