Recency types for analyzing scripting languages

• Authors: Phillip Heidegger;Peter Thiemann
• Venue: ECOOP'10 Proceedings of the 24th European conference on Object-oriented programming
• Year: 2010

With the current surge of scripting technologies, large programs are being built with dynamically typed languages. As these programs grow in size, semantics-based tools gain importance for detecting programming errors as well as for program understanding. As a basis for such tools, we propose a descriptive type system for an imperative call-by-value lambda calculus with objects. The calculus models essential features of JavaScript, a widely used dynamically-typed language: first-class functions, objects as property maps, and prototypes. Our type system infers precise singleton object types for recently allocated objects. These object types are handled flow-sensitively and change during the objects' initialization phase. The notion of recency provides an automatic criterion to subsume these precise object types to summary object types, which are handled flow-insensitively. The criterion applies on a per-object basis. Thus, the type system identifies a generalized initialization phase for each object during which the change of its value is precisely reflected in the change of its type. Unlike with linear types, summary types may refer to singleton types and vice versa. We prove the soundness of the type system and present a constraintbased inference algorithm. An implementation is available on the web.