OGJ gone wild

  • Authors:
  • Nicholas Cameron;James Noble

  • Affiliations:
  • Victoria University of Wellington;Victoria University of Wellington

  • Venue:
  • International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership in Object-Oriented Programming
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Ownership types structure the heap, and can enforce encapsulation properties which improve security, provide more information for the programmer, and allow for better reasoning about programs. Ownership Generic Java (OGJ) implements ownership types using Java generics and some additional type checking. This allows the programmer to use generics and ownership types in the same programs with little addtional syntactic overhead. We combine Java wildcards (represented formally as existential types) with OGJ to enforce an ownership topology using only features of the Java type system. We demonstrate how the owners-as-dominators encapsulation property can be enforced by a minimal addition to the well-formedness rules for types and classes. We show that the type parameterisation of Java generics --- with wildcards --- is sufficient to enforce ownership.