Enforcing reference and object immutability in Java

Authors:
Mahmood Ali;Yoav Zibin;Matt M. Papi;Michael D. Ernst
Affiliations:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Venue:
Companion to the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems languages and applications
Year:
2008

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Abstract

Immutability information is useful in many software engineering tasks, such as modeling, verification, optimization, and refactoring. Furthermore, undesired mutation or side-effect are hard to detect and debug. This paper describes a javac plug-in that enables programmers to write immutability annotations in a Java program to detect and prevent bugs. The IGJ annotations are rich and flexible; the tools are scalable; case studies show they are effective and easy to use; and the annotated program remains compilable with a standard compiler.