SafeJava : a unified type system for safe programming

Making software reliable is one of the most important technological challenges facing our society today. This thesis presents a new type system that addresses this problem by statically preventing several important classes of programming errors. If a program type checks, we guarantee at compile time that the program does not contain any of those errors. We designed our type system in the context of a Java-like object-oriented language; we call the resulting system SafeJava. The SafeJava type system offers significant software engineering benefits. Specifically, it provides a statically enforceable way of specifying object encapsulation and enables local reasoning about program correctness; it combines effects clauses with encapsulation to enable modular checking of methods in the presence of subtyping; it statically prevents data races and deadlocks in multithreaded programs, which are known to be some of the most difficult programming errors to detect, reproduce, and eliminate; it enables software upgrades in persistent object stores to be defined modularly and implemented efficiently; it statically ensures memory safety in programs that manage their own memory using regions; and it also statically ensures that real-time threads in real-time programs are not interrupted for unbounded amounts of time because of garbage collection pauses. Moreover, SafeJava provides all the above benefits in a common unified type system framework, indicating that seemingly different problems such as encapsulation, synchronization issues, software upgrades, and memory management have much in common.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Boyapati, Chandrasekhar, 1973-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Martin C. Rinard.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/30087

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/30087