Over the past thirty years, there has been significant progress in developing general-purpose, language-based approaches to incremental computation, which aims to efficiently update the result of a computation when an input is changed. A key design challenge in such approaches is how to provide efficient incremental support for a broad range of programs. In this paper, we argue that first-class names are a critical linguistic feature for efficient incremental computation. Names identify computations to be reused across differing runs of a program, and making them first class gives programmers a high level of control over reuse. We demonstrate the benefits of names by presenting NOMI-NAL ADAPTON, an ML-like language for incremental computation with names. We describe how to use NOMINAL ADAPTON to efficiently incrementalize several standard programming patterns-including maps, folds, and unfoldsand show how to build efficient, incremental probabilistic trees and tries. Since NOMINAL ADAPTON's implementation is subtle, we formalize it as a core calculus and prove it is from-scratch consistent, meaning it always produces the same answer as simply re-running the computation. Finally, we demonstrate that NOMINAL ADAPTON can provide large speedups over both from-scratch computation and ADAPTON, a previous state-of-the-art incremental computation system.

Over the past thirty years, there has been significant progress in developing general-purpose, language-based approaches to incremental computation, which aims to efficiently update the result of a computation when an input is changed. A key design challenge in such approaches is how to provide efficient incremental support for a broad range of programs. In this paper, we argue that first-class names are a critical linguistic feature for efficient incremental computation. Names identify computations to be reused across differing runs of a program, and making them first class gives programmers a high level of control over reuse. We demonstrate the benefits of names by presenting NOMI-NAL ADAPTON, an ML-like language for incremental computation with names. We describe how to use NOMINAL ADAPTON to efficiently incrementalize several standard programming patterns-including maps, folds, and unfoldsand show how to build efficient, incremental probabilistic trees and tries. Since NOMINAL ADAPTON's implementation is subtle, we formalize it as a core calculus and prove it is from-scratch consistent, meaning it always produces the same answer as simply re-running the computation. Finally, we demonstrate that NOMINAL ADAPTON can provide large speedups over both from-scratch computation and ADAPTON, a previous state-of-the-art incremental computation system.

Owing to the continued use of C (and C++), spatial safety violations (e.g., buffer overflows) still constitute one of today's most dangerous and prevalent security vulnerabilities. To combat these violations, Checked C extends C with bounds-enforced checked pointer types. Checked C is essentially a gradually typed spatially safe C - checked pointers are backwards-binary compatible with legacy pointers, and the language allows them to be added piecemeal, rather than necessarily all at once, so that safety retrofitting can be incremental. This paper presents a semi-automated process for porting a legacy C program to Checked C. The process centers on 3C, a static analysis-based annotation tool. 3C employs two novel static analysis algorithms - typ3c and boun3c - to annotate legacy pointers as checked pointers, and to infer array bounds annotations for pointers that need them. 3C performs a root cause analysis to direct a human developer to code that should be refactored; once done, 3C can be re-run to infer further annotations (and updated root causes). Experiments on 11 programs totaling 319KLoC show 3C to be effective at inferring checked pointer types, and experience with previously and newly ported code finds 3C works well when combined with human-driven refactoring.

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