JavaD: Bringing Ownership Domains to Mainstream Java

摘要

Unlike many proposed designs for ownership type systems, AliasJava has had a publicly available implementation for a few years and has been applied on several case studies. How- ever, AliasJava is currently implemented as a non-backwards compatible extension of Java. As a result, none of the tool support for Java programs is available for AliasJava programs, making it harder to justify the case that Java programs are easier to evolve with Alias-Java annotations than without. Furthermore, using language extensions makes it harder to specify the ownership and aliasing annotations for a large legacy system since the program cannot be annotated partially and incrementally with AliasJava. We present and evaluate JavaD, a re-implementation of the AliasJava language and analysis as a set of Java 1.5 annotations, using the Eclipse Java Development Tooling (JDT) infrastructure and the Crystal Data Flow Analysis framework. We conclude with limitations, lessons learned and future plans.