A Lightweight Type-and-Effect System for Invalidation Safety

Abstract

In many programming paradigms, some program entities are only valid within delimited regions of the program, such as resources that might be automatically deallocated at the end of specific scopes. Outside their live scopes, the corresponding entities are no longer valid – they are permanently invalidated. Sometimes, even within the live scope of a resource, the use of that resource must become temporarily invalid, such as when iterating over a mutable collection, as mutating the collection during iteration might lead to undefined behavior. However, high-level general-purpose programming languages rarely allow this information to be reflected on the type level. Most previously proposed solutions to this problem have relied on restricting either the aliasing or the capture of variables, which can reduce the expressiveness of the language. In this paper, we propose a higher-rank polymorphic type-and-effect system to statically track the permanent and temporary invalidation of sensitive values and resources, without any aliasing or capture restrictions. We use Boolean-algebraic types (unions, intersections, and negations) to precisely model the side effects of program terms and guarantee they are invalidation-safe. Moreover, we present a complete and practical type inference algorithm, whereby programmers only need to annotate the types of higher-rank and polymorphically-recursive functions. Our system, nicknamed InvalML, has a wide range of applications where tracking invalidation is needed, including stack-based and region-based memory management, iterator invalidation, data-race-free concurrency, mutable state encapsulation, type-safe exception and effect handlers, and even scope-safe metaprogramming.

Lionel Parreaux

Assistant Professor

Head of the TACO Lab research group at HKUST.