Ownership types for safe region-based memory management in real-time Java

The Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) allows a program to create real-time threads with hard real-time constraints. Real-time threads use region-based memory management to avoid unbounded pauses caused by interference from the garbage collector. The RTSJ uses runtime checks to ensure that deleting a region does not create dangling references and that real-time threads do not access references to objects allocated in the garbage-collected heap. This paper presents a static type system that guarantees that these runtime checks will never fail for well-typed programs. Our type system therefore 1) provides an important safety guarantee for real-time programs and 2) makes it possible to eliminate the runtime checks and their associated overhead. Our system also makes several contributions over previous work on region types. For object-oriented programs, it combines the benefits of region types and ownership types in a unified type system framework. For multithreaded programs, it a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Chandrasekhar Boyapati, Alexandru Salcianu, William S. Beebee, Martin C. Rinard
• Keywords: PLDI 2003, Programming Languages, Real-time, Real-time Threads, Runtime Checks