Multiple ownership

  • Authors:

  • Nicholas R. Cameron;Sophia Drossopoulou;James Noble;Matthew J. Smith

  • Affiliations:

  • Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom;Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand;Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 22nd annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems and applications
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Existing ownership type systems require objects to have precisely one primary owner, organizing the heap into an ownership tree. Unfortunately, a tree structure is too restrictive for many programs, and prevents many common design patterns where multiple objects interact. Multiple Ownership is an ownership type system where objects can have more than one owner, and the resulting ownership structure forms a DAG. We give a straightforward model for multiple ownership, focusing in particular on how multiple ownership can support a powerful effects system that determines when two computations interfere-in spite of the DAG structure. We present a core programming language MOJO, Multiple ownership for Java-like Objects, including a type and effects system, and soundness proof. In comparison to other systems, MOJO imposes absolutely no restrictions on pointers, modifications or programs' structure, but in spite of this, MOJO's effects can be used to reason about or describe programs' behaviour.