Inferring Method Effect Summaries for Nested Heap Regions

Vakilian, Mohsen

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/17342 Copy

Description

Title

Inferring Method Effect Summaries for Nested Heap Regions

Author(s)

Vakilian, Mohsen

Issue Date

2009-07-23

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Johnson, Ralph E.

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

thesis

Keyword(s)

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

Language

en

Abstract

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.

Type of Resource

text

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

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