Cascade: A Universal Programmer-Assisted Type Qualifier Inference Tool

Vakilian, Mohsen; Phaosawasdi, Amarin; Ernst, M.; Johnson, Ralph E.

doi:10.1109/icse.2015.44

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Second, the viral nature of const makes using it a significant burden, since declaring a method const requires transitively annotating all methods that the first method calls. One participant wished for tools that automatically added const as needed in such cases; for Java, Vakilian et al proposed a tool that would help programmers add similar annotations [42].…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring language support for immutability

Coblenz

Sunshine

Aldrich

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Programming languages can restrict state change by preventing it entirely (immutability) or by restricting which clients may modify state (read-only restrictions). The benefits of immutability and read-only restrictions in software structures have been long-argued by practicing software engineers, researchers, and programming language designers. However, there are many proposals for language mechanisms for restricting state change, with a remarkable diversity of techniques and goals, and there is little empirical data regarding what practicing software engineers want in their tools and what would benefit them. We systematized the large collection of techniques used by programming languages to help programmers prevent undesired changes in state. We interviewed expert software engineers to discover their expectations and requirements, and found that important requirements, such as expressing immutability constraints, were not reflected in features available in the languages participants used. The interview results informed our design of a new language extension for specifying immutability in Java. Through an iterative, participatory design process, we created a tool that reflects requirements from both our interviews and the research literature. CCS Concepts •Software and its engineering → Language features; Software development techniques;

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring language support for immutability

Coblenz

Sunshine

Aldrich

et al. 2016

Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

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“…This may be best done 'on request', at specific locations given by the user, akin to how program synthesis tools can insert synthesised programs directly into code. A similar idea is seen in type qualifier inference tools such as Cascade [17], with guided annotation and specification generation.…”

Section: Lessons Learnedmentioning

confidence: 96%

Guiding user annotations for units-of-measure verification

Orchard,

Contrastin,

Danish

et al. 2020

Preprint

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This extended abstract 1 reports on previous work of the CamFort project in which we developed an external units-of-measure type system for Fortran code, targeted at scientists. Our approach can guide the programmer in adding specifications (type annotations) to existing code, with the aim of easing adoption on legacy code. Pertinent to the topics of the HATRA workshop, we discuss the human-aspects of the tool here. CamFort is open-source and freely available online. 2

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“…Numerous systems enrich the expressiveness of existing type systems with contract-related concepts. Examples include systems for non-null types [Fähndrich and Leino 2003], ownership and uniqueness types [Clarke et al 1998], and others [Foster et al 2002;Vakilian et al 2015]. Indeed, the designers of Spec# chose to mix lightweight static analysis for checking non-null types and method purity with automated theorem proving for functional specifications given in first-order logic [Barnett et al 2011].…”

Section: Lightweight Contractsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting the Semantics into Semantic Versioning

Lam¹,

Dietrich²,

Pearce³

2020

Preprint

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The long-standing aspiration for software reuse has made astonishing strides in the past few years. Many modern software development ecosystems now come with rich sets of publicly-available components contributed by the community. Downstream developers can leverage these upstream components, boosting their productivity.However, components evolve at their own pace. This imposes obligations on and yields benefits for downstream developers, especially since changes can be breaking, requiring additional downstream work to adapt to. Upgrading too late leaves downstream vulnerable to security issues and missing out on useful improvements; upgrading too early results in excess work. Semantic versioning has been proposed as an elegant mechanism to communicate levels of compatibility, enabling downstream developers to automate dependency upgrades.While it is questionable whether a version number can adequately characterize version compatibility in general, we argue that developers would greatly benefit from tools such as semantic version calculators to help them upgrade safely. The time is now for the research community to develop such tools: large component ecosystems exist and are accessible, component interactions have become observable through automated builds, and recent advances in program analysis make the development of relevant tools feasible. In particular, contracts (both traditional and lightweight) are a promising input to semantic versioning calculators, which can suggest whether an upgrade is likely to be safe.

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Cascade: A Universal Programmer-Assisted Type Qualifier Inference Tool

Cited by 9 publications

References 41 publications

Exploring language support for immutability

Exploring language support for immutability

Guiding user annotations for units-of-measure verification

Putting the Semantics into Semantic Versioning

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