Implementation of SHAPES Case Studies (Artifact)

Our main paper presents {SHAPES}, a language extension which offers developers fine-grained control over the placement of data in memory, whilst retaining both memory safety and object abstraction via pooling and clustering. As part of the development of {SHAPES}, we wanted to investigate the usefulness of the concepts {SHAPES} brings to the table. To that extent, we implemented five such case studies. This publication provides the corresponding code and instructions on how to run these case studies and derive the results we provide

Godot: All the Benefits of Implicit and Explicit Futures (Artifact)

This artifact contains an implementation of data-flow futures in terms of control-flow futures, in the Scala language. In the implementation, we show microbenchmarks that solve the three identified problems from the paper: 1) The Type Proliferation Problem, 2) The Fulfilment Observation Problem, and 3) The Future Proliferation Problem There are also detailed instructions on design decisions that differ from the formal semantics and restrictions on the limits of how much can be encoded in the Scala language. We provide examples, e.g., creation of a proxy service using data-flow futures, as well as tests that exercise different parts of the type system

Reference Capabilities for Flexible Memory Management: Extended Version

Verona is a concurrent object-oriented programming language that organises all the objects in a program into a forest of isolated regions. Memory is managed locally for each region, so programmers can control a program's memory use by adjusting objects' partition into regions, and by setting each region's memory management strategy. A thread can only mutate (allocate, deallocate) objects within one active region -- its "window of mutability". Memory management costs are localised to the active region, ensuring overheads can be predicted and controlled. Moving the mutability window between regions is explicit, so code can be executed wherever it is required, yet programs remain in control of memory use. An ownership type system based on reference capabilities enforces region isolation, controlling aliasing within and between regions, yet supporting objects moving between regions and threads. Data accesses never need expensive atomic operations, and are always thread-safe.Comment: 87 pages, 10 figures, 5 listings, 4 tables. Extended version of paper to be published at OOPSLA 202

Ownership-Based Alias Managemant

Object-oriented programming relies on sharing and the mutable states of objects for common data structures, patterns and programming idioms. Sharing and mutable state is a powerful but dangerous combination. Uncontrolled aliasing risks causing representation exposure, where an object's state is exposed and modifiable out of the control of its conceptually owning object. This breaks encapsulation, and hence, in extension, abstraction. Contemporary object-oriented programming languages' support for alias encapsulation is mediocre and easily circumvented. To this end, several proposals have been put forward that strengthen encapsulation to enable construction of more reliable systems and formally reasoning about properties of programs. These systems are vastly superior to the constructs found in for example C++, Java or C#, but have yet to gain acceptance outside the research community. In this thesis, we present three constructs for alias management on top of a deep ownership types system in the context of the Joline programming language. Our constructs are fully statically checkable and impose little run-time overhead. We show the formal semantics and soundness proof for our constructs as well as their formal and informal aliasing properties. We show applications and extensions and perform a practical evaluation of our system with our implemented Joline compiler. The evaluation suggests that our constructs are compatible with real-world programming, makes use of some of our own proposed patterns, and encourages further practical studies of programming with ownership-based constructs for alias management.QC 2010092