Memory usage verification for OO programs

  • Authors:
  • Wei-Ngan Chin;Huu Hai Nguyen;Shengchao Qin;Martin Rinard

  • Affiliations:
  • Computer Science Programme, Singapore-MIT Alliance;Computer Science Programme, Singapore-MIT Alliance;Department of Computer Science, University of Durham;Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • SAS'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Static Analysis
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

We present a new type system for an object-oriented (OO) language that characterizes the sizes of data structures and the amount of heap memory required to successfully execute methods that operate on these data structures. Key components of this type system include type assertions that use symbolic Presburger arithmetic expressions to capture data structure sizes, the effect of methods on the data structures that they manipulate, and the amount of memory that methods allocate and deallocate. For each method, we conservatively capture the amount of memory required to execute the method as a function of the sizes of the method's inputs. The safety guarantee is that the method will never attempt to use more memory than its type expressions specify. We have implemented a type checker to verify memory usages of OO programs. Our experience is that the type system can precisely and effectively capture memory bounds for a wide range of programs.