Ownership-Based Alias Managemant

Object-oriented programming relies on sharing and the mutable states of objects for common data structures, patterns and programming idioms. Sharing and mutable state is a powerful but dangerous combination. Uncontrolled aliasing risks causing representation exposure, where an object’s state is exposed and modifiable out of the control of its conceptually owning object. This breaks encapsulation, and hence, in extension, abstraction. Contemporary object-oriented programming languages’ support for alias encapsulation is mediocre and easily circumvented. To this end, several proposals have been put forward that strengthen encapsulation to enable construction of more reliable systems and formally reasoning about properties of programs. These systems are vastly superior to the constructs found in for example C++, Java or C#, but have yet to gain acceptance outside the research community. In this thesis, we present three constructs for alias management on top of a deep ownership types system in the context of the Joline programming language. Our constructs are fully statically checkable and impose little run-time overhead. We show the formal semantics and soundness proof for our constructs as well as their formal and informal aliasing properties. We show applications and extensions and perform a practical evaluation of our system with our implemented Joline compiler. The evaluation suggests that our constructs are compatible with real-world programming, makes use of some of our own proposed patterns, and encourages further practical studies of programming with ownership-based constructs for alias management.