One of the primary challenges in building and evolving large object-oriented systems is understanding aliasing between objects. Unexpected aliasing can lead to broken invariants, mistaken assumptions, security holes, and surprising side effects, all of which may lead to software defects and complicate software evolution.This paper presents AliasJava, a capability-based alias annotation system for Java that makes alias patterns explicit in the source code, enabling developers to reason more effectively about the interactions in a complex system. We describe our implementation, prove the soundness of the annotation system, and give an algorithm for automatically inferring alias annotations. Our experience suggests that the annotation system is practical, that annotation inference is efficient and yields appropriate annotations, and that the annotations can express important invariants of data structures and of software architectures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.