Encapsulation Enforcement with Dynamic Ownership

Unrestricted aliasing is a problem endemic to object oriented programming. It allows notions of encapsulation fundamental to object oriented programming to be violated. This thesis describes ConstrainedJava, an implementation of a language that provides alias control via a much stronger encapsulation guarantees than traditional object-oriented programming languages, integrated with a constraint system. Unlike most existing aliasing control systems, this encapsulation system integrates well with untyped dynamic languages such as ConstrainedJava. This stronger form of encapsulation has been enhanced to make it easier to write practical programs while still providing useful encapsulation guarantees

Handles: Behavior-Propagating First Class References For Dynamically-Typed Languages

Preprint, Accepted with minor revisionsInternational audienceControlling object graphs and giving specific semantics to references (such as read-only, own- ership, scoped sharing) has been the focus of a large body of research in the context of static type systems. Controlling references to single objects and to graphs of objects is essential to be able to build more secure systems, but is notoriously hard to achieve in absence of static type systems. In this article we embrace this challenge by proposing a solution to the following question: What is the underlying mechanism that can support the definition of properties (such as revocable, read-only, lent) at the reference level in the absence of a static type system? We present handles: first class references that propagate behavioral change dynamically to the object subgraph during program execution. In this article we describe handles and show how handles support the implementation of read-only references and revocable references. Handles have been fully implemented by modifying an existing virtual machine and we report their costs