32 research outputs found
Uniqueness Typing for Resource Management in Message-Passing Concurrency
We view channels as the main form of resources in a message-passing
programming paradigm. These channels need to be carefully managed in settings
where resources are scarce. To study this problem, we extend the pi-calculus
with primitives for channel allocation and deallocation and allow channels to
be reused to communicate values of different types. Inevitably, the added
expressiveness increases the possibilities for runtime errors. We define a
substructural type system which combines uniqueness typing and affine typing to
reject these ill-behaved programs
A Syntactic Model of Mutation and Aliasing
Traditionally, semantic models of imperative languages use an auxiliary
structure which mimics memory. In this way, ownership and other encapsulation
properties need to be reconstructed from the graph structure of such global
memory. We present an alternative "syntactic" model where memory is encoded as
part of the program rather than as a separate resource. This means that
execution can be modelled by just rewriting source code terms, as in semantic
models for functional programs. Formally, this is achieved by the block
construct, introducing local variable declarations, which play the role of
memory when their initializing expressions have been evaluated. In this way, we
obtain a language semantics which directly represents at the syntactic level
constraints on aliasing, allowing simpler reasoning about related properties.
To illustrate this advantage, we consider the issue, widely studied in the
literature, of characterizing an isolated portion of memory, which cannot be
reached through external references. In the syntactic model, closed block
values, called "capsules", provide a simple representation of isolated portions
of memory, and capsules can be safely moved to another location in the memory,
without introducing sharing, by means of "affine' variables. We prove that the
syntactic model can be encoded in the conventional one, hence efficiently
implemented.Comment: In Proceedings DCM 2018 and ITRS 2018 , arXiv:1904.0956
Featherweight Generic Confinement
Existing approaches to object encapsulation either rely on ad hoc syntactic restrictions or
require the use of specialised type systems. Syntactic restrictions are difficult to scale and
to prove correct, while specialised type systems require extensive changes to programming
languages. We demonstrate that confinement can be enforced cheaply in Featherweight
Generic Java, with no essential change to the underlying language or type system. This
result demonstrates that polymorphic type parameters can simultaneously act as ownership
parameters and should facilitate the adoption of confinement and ownership type systems in
general-purpose programming languages
Tribe: More Types for Virtual Classes
Beginning with Beta, a range of programming language mechanisms have been developed to allow inheritance in the presence of mutually dependent classes. This paper presents Tribe, a type system which generalises and simplifies other formalisms of such mechanisms, by treating issues which are inessential for soundness, such as the precise details of dispatch and path initialisation, as orthogonal to the core formalism. Tribe can support path types dependent simultaneously on both classes and objects, which is useful for writing library code, and ubiquitous access to an objects family (= owner), which offers family polymorphism without the need to drag around family arguments. Languages based on Tribe will be both simpler and more expressive than existing designs, while having a simpler type system, serving as a useful basis for future language designs
Functional Ownership through Fractional Uniqueness
Ownership and borrowing systems, designed to enforce safe memory management
without the need for garbage collection, have been brought to the fore by the
Rust programming language. Rust also aims to bring some guarantees offered by
functional programming into the realm of performant systems code, but the type
system is largely separate from the ownership model, with type and borrow
checking happening in separate compilation phases. Recent models such as
RustBelt and Oxide aim to formalise Rust in depth, but there is less focus on
integrating the basic ideas into more traditional type systems. An approach
designed to expose an essential core for ownership and borrowing would open the
door for functional languages to borrow concepts found in Rust and other
ownership frameworks, so that more programmers can enjoy their benefits.
One strategy for managing memory in a functional setting is through
uniqueness types, but these offer a coarse-grained view: either a value has
exactly one reference, and can be mutated safely, or it cannot, since other
references may exist. Recent work demonstrates that linear and uniqueness types
can be combined in a single system to offer restrictions on program behaviour
and guarantees about memory usage. We develop this connection further, showing
that just as graded type systems like those of Granule and Idris generalise
linearity, Rust's ownership model arises as a graded generalisation of
uniqueness. We combine fractional permissions with grading to give the first
account of ownership and borrowing that smoothly integrates into a standard
type system alongside linearity and graded types, and extend Granule
accordingly with these ideas.Comment: 23 pages + references. In submissio