A Type-Based Complexity Analysis of Object Oriented Programs

A type system is introduced for a generic Object Oriented programming language in order to infer resource upper bounds. A sound and complete characterization of the set of polynomial time computable functions is obtained. As a consequence, the heap-space and the stack-space requirements of typed programs are also bounded polynomially. This type system is inspired by previous works on Implicit Computational Complexity, using tiering and non-interference techniques. The presented methodology has several advantages. First, it provides explicit big O polynomial upper bounds to the programmer, hence its use could allow the programmer to avoid memory errors. Second, type checking is decidable in polynomial time. Last, it has a good expressivity since it analyzes most object oriented features like inheritance, overload, override and recursion. Moreover it can deal with loops guarded by objects and can also be extended to statements that alter the control flow like break or return.