Inferring Method Effect Summaries for Nested Heap Regions

Effect systems are important for reasoning about the side effects of a program. Although effect systems have been around for decades, they have not been widely adopted in practice because of the large number of annotations that they require. A tool that infers effects automatically can make effect systems practical. We present an effect inference algorithm and an Eclipse plug-in, DPJizer, that alleviate the burden of writing effect annotations for a language called Deterministic Parallel Java (DPJ). The key novel feature of the algorithm is the ability to infer effects on nested heap regions. Besides DPJ, we also illustrate how the algorithm can be used for a different effect system based on object ownership. Our experience shows that DPJizer is both useful and effective: inferring effects annotations automatically saves significant programming burden; and inferred effects are comparable to those in manually-annotated programs, while in many cases they are more accurate.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2010

Author dc:creator

• Vakilian, Mohsen

Contributors dc:contributor

• Johnson, Ralph E.

• refactoring
• parallelism
• type systems
• inference
• object-oriented programming

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/17342

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/17342