Views, Types and Viewtypes

The need for direct memory manipulation through pointers is essential in many applications. However, it is also commonly understood that the use (or probably misuse) of pointers is a rich source for program errors. In this paper, we design and then formalize a type system that can effectively prevent dangling pointers from being ever accessed during the evaluation of a well-type program. In particular, we present an approach that makes novel use of linear types in support of the construction of memory-safe programs while allowing explicit pointer manipulation such as pointer arithmetic.