Substructural Typestates Filipe Militao˜ Jonathan Aldrich Lu´ıs Caires Carnegie Mellon University & Carnegie Mellon University Universidade Nova de Lisboa Universidade Nova de Lisboa
[email protected] [email protected] fi
[email protected] Abstract tocols, of the kind captured by typestate systems [6, 16, 40, 41], are Finding simple, yet expressive, verification techniques to reason a considerable obstacle to producing reliable code. For instance, about both aliasing and mutable state has been a major challenge in Java a FileOutputStream type represents both the open and for static program verification. One such approach, of practical closed states of that abstraction by relying on dynamic tests to de- relevance, is centered around a lightweight typing discipline where tect incorrect uses (such as writing to a closed stream) instead of types denote abstract object states, known as typestates. statically tracking the changing properties of the type. In this paper, we show how key typestate concepts can be pre- A diverse set of techniques (such as alias types [2, 13, 15, 39], cisely captured by a substructural type-and-effect system, exploit- typestate [6, 16, 34], behavioral types [10], and others [20, 26, 44, ing ideas from linear and separation logic. Building on this foun- 45, 47]; discussed in more detail in Section 4) have been proposed dation, we show how a small set of primitive concepts can be com- to tackle this problem, with various degrees of expressiveness. posed to express high-level idioms such as objects with multiple In this work, we reconstruct several core concepts introduced in independent state dimensions, dynamic state tests, and behavior- practical typestate systems (e.g., [6]), by modeling them in a oriented usage protocols that enforce strong information hiding.