research-article

Substructural typestates

Authors:

Filipe Milit�o,

Jonathan Aldrich,

Lu�s CairesAuthors Info & Claims

PLPV '14: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Programming Languages meets Program Verification

Pages 15 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/2541568.2541574

Published: 11 January 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Finding simple, yet expressive, verification techniques to reason about both aliasing and mutable state has been a major challenge for static program verification. One such approach, of practical relevance, is centered around a lightweight typing discipline where types denote abstract object states, known as typestates.

In this paper, we show how key typestate concepts can be precisely captured by a substructural type-and-effect system, exploiting ideas from linear and separation logic. Building on this foundation, we show how a small set of primitive concepts can be composed to express high-level idioms such as objects with multiple independent state dimensions, dynamic state tests, and behavior-oriented usage protocols that enforce strong information hiding. By exploring the relationship between two mainstream modularity concepts, state abstraction and hiding, we also provide new insights on how they naturally fit together and complement one another.

Technically, our results are based on a typed lambda calculus with mutable references, location-dependent types, and second-order polymorphism. The soundness of our type system is shown through progress and preservation theorems. We also describe a prototype implementation of a type checker for our system, which is available on the web and can be used to experiment with the examples in the paper.

References

[1]

Prototype. https://code.google.com/p/dead-parrot/.

[2]

A. Ahmed, M. Fluet, and G. Morrisett. L³: A linear language with locations. Fundam. Inform., 77 (4): 397--449, 2007.

Digital Library

[3]

N. E. Beckman, K. Bierhoff, and J. Aldrich. Verifying correct usage of atomic blocks and typestate. In OOPSLA'08, pages 227--244. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[4]

N. E. Beckman, Y. P. Kim, S. Stork, and J. Aldrich. Reducing stm overhead with access permissions. In IWACO'09, pages 2:1--2:10. ACM, 2009.

Digital Library

[5]

N. E. Beckman, D. Kim, and J. Aldrich. An empirical study of object protocols in the wild. In ECOOP'11, pages 2--26. Springer-Verlag, 2011.

Digital Library

[6]

K. Bierhoff and J. Aldrich. Modular typestate checking of aliased objects. In OOPSLA 2007, pages 301--320, 2007.

Digital Library

[7]

J. Boyland. Alias burying: unique variables without destructive reads. Softw. Pract. Exper., 31 (6): 533--553, May 2001.

Digital Library

[8]

J. Boyland. Checking interference with fractional permissions. In Proc. Static Analysis Symposium, pages 55--72, 2003.

Digital Library

[9]

J. T. Boyland and W. Retert. Connecting effects and uniqueness with adoption. In POPL '05, pages 283--295. ACM, 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

L. Caires and J. a. C. Seco. The type discipline of behavioral separation. In POPL '13, pages 275--286. ACM, 2013.

Digital Library

[11]

C. Calcagno, P. W. O'Hearn, and H. Yang. Local action and abstract separation logic. In Proc. Logic in Computer Science, pages 366--378, 2007.

Digital Library

[12]

A. Chargu�raud and F. Pottier. Functional translation of a calculus of capabilities. In ICFP '08, pages 213--224. ACM, 2008.

Digital Library

[13]

K. Crary, D. Walker, and G. Morrisett. Typed memory management in a calculus of capabilities. In POPL '99, pages 262--275. ACM, 1999.

Digital Library

[14]

R. Davies and F. Pfenning. Intersection types and computational effects. In ICFP '00, pages 198--208. ACM, 2000.

Digital Library

[15]

R. DeLine and M. F�hndrich. Enforcing high-level protocols in low-level software. In PLDI 2001, pages 59--69. ACM, 2001.

Digital Library

[16]

R. DeLine and M. F�hndrich. Typestates for objects. In ECOOP, pages 465--490. Springer, 2004.

[17]

T. Dinsdale-Young, L. Birkedal, P. Gardner, M. Parkinson, and H. Yang. Views: compositional reasoning for concurrent programs. In POPL '13, pages 287--300. ACM, 2013.

Digital Library

[18]

J. Dunfield and F. Pfenning. Type assignment for intersections and unions in call-by-value languages. In FOSSACS '03, pages 250--266. Springer-Verlag LNCS 2620, 2003.

Digital Library

[19]

M. Fahndrich and R. DeLine. Adoption and focus: practical linear types for imperative programming. In PLDI 2002, pages 13--24. ACM, 2002.

Digital Library

[20]

S. J. Gay, V. T. Vasconcelos, A. Ravara, N. Gesbert, and A. Z. Caldeira. Modular session types for distributed object-oriented programming. In POPL, pages 299--312, 2010.

Digital Library

[21]

D. K. Gifford and J. M. Lucassen. Integrating functional and imperative programming. In LFP '86, pages 28--38. ACM, 1986.

Digital Library

[22]

J.-Y. Girard. Linear logic. Theor. Comput. Sci., 50: 1--102, 1987.

Digital Library

[23]

P. Haller and M. Odersky. Capabilities for uniqueness and borrowing. In ECOOP'10, pages 354--378. Springer-Verlag, 2010.

Digital Library

[24]

N. R. Krishnaswami, A. Turon, D. Dreyer, and D. Garg. Superficially substructural types. In ICFP 2012, pages 41--54. ACM, 2012.

Digital Library

[25]

B. H. Liskov and J. M. Wing. A behavioral notion of subtyping. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 16 (6): 1811--1841, Nov. 1994.

Digital Library

[26]

K. Mazurak, J. Zhao, and S. Zdancewic. Lightweight linear types in system f^o. In TLDI '10, pages 77--88. ACM, 2010.

Digital Library

[27]

F. Milit�o, J. Aldrich, and L. Caires. Aliasing control with view-based typestate. In FTfJP, pages 7:1--7:7. ACM, 2010.

Digital Library

[28]

F. Milit�o, J. Aldrich, and L. Caires. Substructural typestates (technical appendix), 2013. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/ foliveir/papers/plpv14-appendix.pdf

[29]

J. C. Mitchell and G. D. Plotkin. Abstract types have existential type. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., 10 (3): 470--502, July 1988.

Digital Library

[30]

K. Naden, R. Bocchino, J. Aldrich, and K. Bierhoff. A type system for borrowing permissions. In POPL 2012, pages 557--570. ACM, 2012.

Digital Library

[31]

A. Nanevski, G. Morrisett, and L. Birkedal. Polymorphism and separation in hoare type theory. In ICFP '06, pages 62--73. ACM, 2006.

Digital Library

[32]

A. Nanevski, A. Ahmed, G. Morrisett, and L. Birkedal. Abstract predicates and mutable adts in hoare type theory. In ESOP'07, pages 189--204. Springer-Verlag, 2007.

Digital Library

[33]

M. Parkinson and G. Bierman. Separation logic and abstraction. In POPL, pages 247--258. ACM, 2005.

Digital Library

[34]

X. Qi and A. C. Myers. Masked types for sound object initialization. In POPL, pages 53--65, 2009.

Digital Library

[35]

J. Reynolds. Syntactic control of interference part 2. In G. Ausiello, M. Dezani-Ciancaglini, and S. Rocca, editors, Automata, Languages and Programming, volume 372 of phLecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 704--722. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1989.

Digital Library

[36]

J. C. Reynolds. Separation logic: A logic for shared mutable data structures. In Proc. Logic in Computer Science, pages 55--74, 2002.

Digital Library

[37]

P. M. Rondon, M. Kawaguchi, and R. Jhala. Low-level liquid types. In POPL '10, pages 131--144. ACM, 2010.

Digital Library

[38]

A. Sabry and M. Felleisen. Reasoning about programs in continuation-passing style. In Proc. LISP and Functional Programming, pages 288--298, 1992.

Digital Library

[39]

F. Smith, D. Walker, and G. Morrisett. Alias types. In ESOP, pages 366--381. Springer-Verlag, 2000.

Digital Library

[40]

R. E. Strom. Mechanisms for compile-time enforcement of security. In POPL '83, pages 276--284. ACM, 1983.

Digital Library

[41]

R. E. Strom and S. Yemini. Typestate: A programming language concept for enhancing software reliability. IEEE Trans. Software Eng., 12 (1): 157--171, 1986.

Digital Library

[42]

J. Sunshine, K. Naden, S. Stork, J. Aldrich, and E. Tanter. First-class state change in plaid. In OOPSLA '11, pages 713--732. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[43]

K. Takeuchi, K. Honda, and M. Kubo. An interaction-based language and its typing system. In Proc. of PARLE Conference on Parallel Architectures and Languages Europe, pages 398--413. Springer-Verlag, 1994.

Digital Library

[44]

J. A. Tov and R. Pucella. Practical affine types. In POPL, pages 447--458. ACM, 2011.

Digital Library

[45]

J. Van Den Bos and C. Laffra. Procol: a parallel object language with protocols. In OOPSLA '89, pages 95--102. ACM, 1989.

Digital Library

[46]

S. van Staden and C. Calcagno. Reasoning about multiple related abstractions with multistar. In OOPSLA '10, pages 504--519. ACM, 2010.

Digital Library

[47]

P. Wadler. Linear types can change the world! In Programming Concepts and Methods. North, 1990.

[48]

D. Walker and J. G. Morrisett. Alias types for recursive data structures. In Selected papers from the Third International Workshop on Types in Compilation, TIC '00, pages 177--206. Springer-Verlag, 2001.

Digital Library

Cited By

Alsubhi ADardha O(2024)Coconut: Typestates for�Embedded SystemsCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-031-62697-5_12(219-238)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-62697-5_12
Krishnaswami NPradic PBenton N(2015)Integrating Linear and Dependent TypesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775051.267696950:1(17-30)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775051.2676969
Krishnaswami NPradic PBenton NRajamani SWalker D(2015)Integrating Linear and Dependent TypesProceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2676726.2676969(17-30)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2676726.2676969
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Substructural typestates
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Abstract data types
2. Theory of computation
  1. Logic
  2. Semantics and reasoning
    1. Program reasoning

Recommendations

Functional translation of a calculus of capabilities
ICFP '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Reasoning about imperative programs requires the ability to track aliasing and ownership properties. We present a type system that provides this ability, by using regions, capabilities, and singleton types. It is designed for a high-level calculus with ...
Functional translation of a calculus of capabilities
ICFP '08

Reasoning about imperative programs requires the ability to track aliasing and ownership properties. We present a type system that provides this ability, by using regions, capabilities, and singleton types. It is designed for a high-level calculus with ...
Superficially substructural types
ICFP '12

Many substructural type systems have been proposed for controlling access to shared state in higher-order languages. Central to these systems is the notion of a *resource*, which may be split into disjoint pieces that different parts of a program can ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

PLPV '14: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2014 Workshop on Programming Languages meets Program Verification

January 2014

66 pages

ISBN:9781450325677

DOI:10.1145/2541568

Program Chairs:
Nils Anders Danielsson
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
,
Bart Jacobs
KU Leuven - University of Leuven, Belgium

Copyright � 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

In-Cooperation

SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 January 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

POPL '14

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

POPL '14: The 41st Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 21, 2014

California, San Diego, USA

Acceptance Rates

PLPV '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 5 of 7 submissions, 71%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 18 of 25 submissions, 72%

Upcoming Conference

POPL '25

Sponsor:
sigplan

The 52nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

January 19 - 25, 2025

Denver , CO , USA

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
139
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)4
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 19 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Alsubhi ADardha O(2024)Coconut: Typestates for�Embedded SystemsCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-031-62697-5_12(219-238)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-62697-5_12
Krishnaswami NPradic PBenton N(2015)Integrating Linear and Dependent TypesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2775051.267696950:1(17-30)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2775051.2676969
Krishnaswami NPradic PBenton NRajamani SWalker D(2015)Integrating Linear and Dependent TypesProceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2676726.2676969(17-30)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2676726.2676969
Milit�o FAldrich JCaires L(2014)Rely-Guarantee ProtocolsProceedings of the 28th European Conference on ECOOP 2014 --- Object-Oriented Programming - Volume 858610.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_14(334-359)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-662-44202-9_14

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents