A retrospective on aliasing type systems: 2012-2022

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan Aldrich

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

  • Venue:
  • Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Introduction. Over the last ten years, type systems for reasoning about aliasing have begun to be adopted into mainstream languages and tools. The most obvious benefits came in the area of concurrency, expanding on pioneering work that applied ownership [8], regions [6], and permissions [9,4] to ensure the safety of concurrent programs. However, concurrency alone was insufficient to drive adoption. Aliasing type systems really caught on when researchers found common abstractions that were also useful for other purposes: providing encapsulation [17], enhancing security [7,2], and assisting verification [16,10]-though verification remains a niche application due to the engineering time required to specify and verify code.