Static safety guarantees for a low-level multithreaded language with regions

Authors:
Prodromos Gerakios;Nikolaos Papaspyrou;Konstantinos Sagonas
Affiliations:
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece;School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece and Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Sweden
Venue:
Science of Computer Programming
Year:
2014

Citing 29
Cited 0

Implementation of the typed call-by-value λ-calculus using a stack of regions

POPL '94 Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Efficient detection of all pointer and array access errors

PLDI '94 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1994 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Better static memory management: improving region-based analysis of higher-order languages

PLDI '95 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1995 conference on Programming language design and implementation
The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language

PLDI '98 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Weak ordering—a new definition

ISCA '90 Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
Memory consistency and event ordering in scalable shared-memory multiprocessors

ISCA '90 Proceedings of the 17th annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
A New Approach to Proving the Correctness of Multiprocess Programs

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Language support for regions

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation
On regions and linear types (extended abstract)

Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Region-based memory management in cyclone

PLDI '02 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation
Ownership types for safe programming: preventing data races and deadlocks

OOPSLA '02 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
Type-safe multithreading in cyclone

Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN international workshop on Types in languages design and implementation
Object Types against Races

CONCUR '99 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Concurrency Theory
A direct approach to control-flow sensitive region-based memory management

Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming
The nesC language: A holistic approach to networked embedded systems

PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Ownership types for safe region-based memory management in real-time Java

PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Scoped Types for Real-Time Java

RTSS '04 Proceedings of the 25th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium
Threads cannot be implemented as a library

Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
CCured: type-safe retrofitting of legacy software

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
Safe manual memory management in cyclone

Science of Computer Programming - Special issue on five perspectives on modern memory management: Systems, hardware and theory
Implicit ownership types for memory management

Science of Computer Programming
Pillar: A Parallel Implementation Language

Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing
A type and effect system for deterministic parallel Java

Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Race-free and memory-safe multithreading: design and implementation in cyclone

Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Types in language design and implementation
Dependent types for low-level programming

ESOP'07 Proceedings of the 16th European conference on Programming
A time-aware type system for data-race protection and guaranteed initialization

Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
Safe nondeterminism in a deterministic-by-default parallel language

Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
A type and effect system for deadlock avoidance in low-level languages

Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Types in language design and implementation
Linear regions are all you need

ESOP'06 Proceedings of the 15th European conference on Programming Languages and Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We present the design of a formal low-level multithreaded language with advanced region-based memory management and thread synchronization primitives, where well-typed programs are memory safe and race free. In our language, regions and locks are combined in a single hierarchy and are subject to uniform ownership constraints imposed by this hierarchical structure: deallocating a region causes its sub-regions to be deallocated. Similarly, when a region is read/write-protected, then its sub-regions inherit the same access rights. We discuss aspects of the integration and implementation of the formal language within Cyclone and evaluate the performance of code produced by the modified Cyclone compiler against highly optimized C programs using pthreads. Our results show that the performance overhead for guaranteed race freedom and memory safety is in most cases acceptable.