Formal Type Soundness for Cyclone's Region System

Cyclone is a polymorphic, type-safe programming language derived from C\@. The primary design goals of Cyclone are to let programmers control data representations and memory management without sacrificing type-safety. In this paper, we focus on the region-based memory management of Cyclone and its static typing discipline. The design incorporates several advancements, including support for region subtyping and a coherent integration with stack allocation and a garbage collector. To support separate compilation, Cyclone requires programmers to write some explicit region annotations, but uses a combination of default annotations, local type inference, and a novel treatment of region effects to reduce this burden. As a result, we integrate C idioms in a region-based framework. In our experience, porting legacy C to Cyclone has required altering about 8\% of the code; of the changes, only 6\% (of the 8\%) were region annotations. This technical report is really two documents in one: The first part is a paper submitted for publication in November, 2001. The second part is the full formal language and type-safety proof mentioned briefly in the first part. If you have already read a version of, ``Region-Based Memory Management in Cyclone'', then you should proceed directly to Section 9

Cyclone User's Manual, Version 0.1.3

The current version of this manual should be available at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/cyclone/ and http://www.research.att.com/projects/cyclone/. The version here describes Cyclone Version 0.1.3, although minor changes may have occurred before the release

Cyclone: A safe dialect of C

Cyclone is a safe dialect of C. It has been designed from the ground up to prevent the buffer overflows, format string attacks, and memory management errors that are common in C programs, while retaining C’s syntax and semantics. This paper examines safety violations enabled by C’s design, and shows how Cyclone avoids them, without giving up C’s hallmark control over low-level details such as data representation and memory management.