Generic Ownership: Practical Alias Control in Object-Oriented Programming Languages

Modern object-oriented languages support many techniques that simplify the work of a programmer. Among them is type genericity — an ability to create generic descriptions of algorithms and object structures that will be automatically specialised by supplying type information at run time. On the other hand, object-oriented technologies still suffer from bad effects of aliasing— a case of many objects in program’s memory referring to the same object via different references. Ownership types is one of the ways to tame aliasing — they provide information about who is allowed to access a particular object and who is not. This PhD proposal outlines the ideas of generic ownership — a way to make aliasing control an obvious and integral feature of modern objectoriented languages. We present the current state of aliasing research and show how our work fits in. We then describe a new language — Ownership Generic Java (OGJ) — that we created that seamlessly combines type genericity and ownership types. We describe the implementation of the compiler and the type system based on Featherweight Generic Java that allows us to prove that our language supports static ownership. Additionally, we present a formal defaultingmechanism allowing any Java program to gain the benefits of ownership with no change to the underlying source code. Finally, this proposal presents the future work planned as part of this PhD thesis and a structured plan detailing how it is going to be achieved.