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Encoding Ownership Types in Java

  • Conference paper
Book cover Objects, Models, Components, Patterns (TOOLS 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6141))

Abstract

Ownership types systems organise the heap into a hierarchy which can be used to support encapsulation properties, effects, and invariants. Ownership types have many applications including parallelisation, concurrency, memory management, and security. In this paper, we show that several flavours and extensions of ownership types can be entirely encoded using the standard Java type system.

Ownership types systems usually require a sizable effort to implement and the relation of ownership types to standard type systems is poorly understood. Our encoding demonstrates the connection between ownership types and parametric and existential types. We formalise our encoding using a model for Java’s type system, and prove that it is sound and enforces an ownership hierarchy. Finally, we leverage our encoding to produce lightweight compilers for Ownership Types and Universe Types — each compiler took only one day to implement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

    Nicholas Cameron & James Noble

Authors
  1. Nicholas Cameron
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  2. James Noble
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, 47907, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Jan Vitek

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© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cameron, N., Noble, J. (2010). Encoding Ownership Types in Java. In: Vitek, J. (eds) Objects, Models, Components, Patterns. TOOLS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6141. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13953-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13953-6_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13952-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13953-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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