BibTeX
@MISC{Monnier04typedregions,
author = {Stefan Monnier},
title = {Typed Regions},
year = {2004}
}
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Abstract
Standard type systems are not sufficiently expressive when applied to low-level memory-management code. Such code often requires some form of strong update (i.e. assignments that change the type of the affected location) and needs to reason about the relative position of objects in memory. We present a novel type system which, like alias types, provides a form of strong update, but with the advantage that it does not require the aliasing pattern to be statically described. It can also provide operations over sequential memory locations and allows covariant reference casts, both of which are required to implement a type-preserving stop© garbage collector that can properly collect cyclic data-structures. Finally, this type system is able to keep track of almost arbitrary properties of values and state, giving it a power formerly reserved to Hoare logic. As the technology of certifying compilation and proof carrying code [16, 1, 8] progresses, the need to ensure the safety of the runtime system increases: if you go through the trouble of writing a foundational proof of safety of your code, you would rather not trust an unverified conservative garbage collector (GC) with your data. For this reason, it is important to be able to write a type-safe GC, but the state of the art in this matter is still completely impractical: it cannot even handle cyclic data-structures. This paper's main goals are thus: .
