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A Formal Soundness Proof of Region-Based Memory Management for Object-Oriented Paradigm

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Formal Methods and Software Engineering (ICFEM 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5256))

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Abstract

Region-based memory management has been proposed as a viable alternative to garbage collection for real-time applications and embedded software. In our previous work we have developed a region type inference algorithm that provides an automatic compile-time region-based memory management for object-oriented paradigm. In this work we present a formal soundness proof of the region type system that is the target of our region inference. More precisely, we prove that the object-oriented programs accepted by our region type system achieve region-based memory management in a safe way. That means, the regions follow a stack-of-regions discipline and regions deallocation never create dangling references in the store and on the program stack. Our contribution is to provide a simple syntactic proof that is based on induction and follows the standard steps of a type safety proof. In contrast the previous safety proofs provided for other region type systems employ quite elaborate techniques.

The work is supported in part by the EPSRC project EP/E021948/1.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Durham University, UK

    Florin Craciun & Shengchao Qin

  2. Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

    Wei-Ngan Chin

Authors
  1. Florin Craciun
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  2. Shengchao Qin
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  3. Wei-Ngan Chin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, Hosei University, 3-7-2 Kajino-cho Koganei-shi, 184-8584, Tokoy, Japan

    Shaoying Liu

  2. Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, 1280 Main St West, L8S 4K1, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    Tom Maibaum

  3. Department of Computer Science and Communication Engineering, , Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, 6-10-1-Hakozaki, 812-8581, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, Japan

    Keijiro Araki

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Craciun, F., Qin, S., Chin, WN. (2008). A Formal Soundness Proof of Region-Based Memory Management for Object-Oriented Paradigm. In: Liu, S., Maibaum, T., Araki, K. (eds) Formal Methods and Software Engineering. ICFEM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5256. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88194-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88194-0_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-88193-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-88194-0

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