Abstract Flow-Sensitive Type Qualifiers.pdfVIP

Flow-Sensitive Type Qualifiers? Jeffrey S. Foster Tachio Terauchi Alex Aiken EECS Department University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-1776 {jfoster,tachio,aiken}@ Abstract We present a system for extending standard type systems with flow-sensitive type qualifiers. Users annotate their pro- grams with type qualifiers, and inference checks that the annotations are correct. In our system only the type quali- fiers are modeled flow-sensitively—the underlying standard types are unchanged, which allows us to obtain an efficient constraint-based inference algorithm that integrates flow- insensitive alias analysis, effect inference, and ideas from linear type systems to support strong updates. We demon- strate the usefulness of flow-sensitive type qualifiers by find- ing a number of new locking bugs in the Linux kernel. 1 Introduction Standard type systems are flow-insensitive, meaning a value’s type is the same everywhere. However, many impor- tant properties are flow-sensitive. Checking such properties requires associating different facts with a value at different program points. This paper shows how to extend standard type systems with user-specified flow-sensitive type qualifiers, which are atomic properties that refine standard types. In our system users annotate programs with type qualifiers, and inference checks that the annotations are correct. The critical feature of our approach is that flow-sensitivity is restricted to the type qualifiers that decorate types—the underlying standard types are unchanged—which allows us to obtain an efficient type inference algorithm. Type qualifiers capture a natural class of flow-sensitive properties, while efficient inference of the type qualifiers allows us to apply an implementation to large code bases with few user annotations. For an example of type qualifiers, consider the type File used for I/O operations on files. In most systems File op- erations can only be used in certain ways: a file must be opened for rea