Checking and inferring local non-aliasing

Aiken, Alex; Foster, Jeffrey S.; Kodumal, John; Terauchi, Tachio

doi:10.1145/780822.781146

Cited by 22 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…1 Representation exposure occurs when implementation details are accessible to clients. Java's access control mechanisms (for example, the private keyword) partly address this problem; Javari prevents some additional problems.…”

Section: Public Readonly Int[] Toarray() {mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Determining complete, accurate alias information remains beyond the state of the art; fortunately, the analyses below do not require full alias analysis. Obtaining alias information about a particular reference can be easier and more precise than the general problem [1]. Many programs use (some) pointers in disciplined and limited ways; these may correspond to, and may be motivated by, the places where programmers desire to reason about immutability.…”

Section: Type-based Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

A practical type system and language for reference immutability

Birka

Ernst

2004

Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications

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This paper describes a type system that is capable of expressing and enforcing immutability constraints. The specific constraint expressed is that the abstract state of the object to which an immutable reference refers cannot be modified using that reference. The abstract state is (part of) the transitively reachable state: that is, the state of the object and all state reachable from it by following references. The type system permits explicitly excluding fields or objects from the abstract state of an object. For a statically type-safe language, the type system guarantees reference immutability. If the language is extended with immutability downcasts, then run-time checks enforce the reference immutability constraints.In order to better understand the usability and efficacy of the type system, we have implemented an extension to Java, called Javari, that includes all the features of our type system. Javari is interoperable with Java and existing JVMs. It can be viewed as a proposal for the semantics of the Java const keyword, though Javari's syntax uses readonly instead. This paper describes the design and implementation of Javari, including the type-checking rules for the language. This paper also discusses experience with 160,000 lines of Javari code. Javari was easy to use and provided a number of benefits, including detecting errors in well-tested code.

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Section: Public Readonly Int[] Toarray() {mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Type-based Analysesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A practical type system and language for reference immutability

Birka

Ernst

2004

Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Compared to Cyclone's support for unique pointers in non-unique context, adoption prevents more space leaks, but requires hidden data fields so the run-time system can deallocate data structures implicitly. Focus (which is similar to Aiken et al's restrict [38] allows adopted objects to be temporarily unique. Compared to swap, focus does not incur run-time overhead, but the type system to prevent access through an unknown alias requires substantially more user annotations because it must ensure a non-local invariant.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Safe manual memory management in Cyclone

Swamy

Hicks

Morrisett

et al. 2006

Science of Computer Programming

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The goal of the Cyclone project is to investigate how to make a low-level C-like language safe. Our most difficult challenge has been providing programmers with control over memory management while retaining safety. This paper describes our experience trying to integrate and use effectively two previously-proposed, safe memory-management mechanisms: statically-scoped regions and tracked pointers. We found that these typing mechanisms can be combined to build alternative memory-management abstractions, such as reference counted objects and arenas with dynamic lifetimes, and thus provide a flexible basis. Our experience -porting C programs and device drivers, and building new applications for resource-constrained systems -confirms that experts can use these features to improve memory footprint and sometimes to improve throughput when used instead of, or in combination with, conservative garbage collection.

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“…Recently, Foster et al have provided a flow-insensitive type inference procedure for inferring that some expressions in a procedure are not aliased, allowing for strong updates in certain cases [2]. Our approach is path-sensitive, because of which it is able to perform strong updates in more cases.…”

Section: Strong Updates On Heap Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent work by Aiken et al[2] allows for strong updates without shape analysis, when the aliasing relationships in the code satisfy certain constraints (seeSection 6).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Software validation via scalable path-sensitive value flow analysis

DorNurit¹,

AdamsStephen²,

DasManuvir³

et al. 2004

SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes

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In this paper, we present a new algorithm for tracking the flow of values through a program. Our algorithm represents a substantial improvement over the state of the art. Previously described value flow analyses that are control-flow sensitive do not scale well, nor do they eliminate value flow information from infeasible execution paths (i.e., they are path-insensitive). Our algorithm scales to large programs, and it is path-sensitive.The efficiency of our algorithm arises from three insights: The value flow problem can be "bit-vectorized" by tracking the flow of one value at a time; dataflow facts from different execution paths with the same value flow information can be merged; and information about complex aliasing that affects value flow can be plugged in from a different analysis.We have incorporated our analysis in ESP, a software validation tool. We have used ESP to validate the Windows operating system kernel (a million lines of code) against an important security property. This experience suggests that our algorithm scales to large programs, and is accurate enough to trace the flow of values in real code.

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Checking and inferring local non-aliasing

Cited by 22 publications

References 26 publications

A practical type system and language for reference immutability

A practical type system and language for reference immutability

Safe manual memory management in Cyclone

Software validation via scalable path-sensitive value flow analysis

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