Ownership, Uniqueness, and Immutability

Programming in an object-oriented language demands a fine balance between high degrees of expressiveness and control. At one level, we need to permit objects to interact freely to achieve our implementation goals. At a higher level, we need to enforce architectural constraints so that the system can be understood by new developers and can evolve as requirements change. To resolve this tension, numerous explorers have ventured out into the vast landscape of type systems expressing ownership and behavioural restrictions such as immutability. (Many have never returned.) This work in progress reports on our consolidation of the resulting discoveries into a single programming language. Our language, Joe3, imposes little additional syntactic overhead, yet can encode powerful patterns such as fractional permissions, and the reference modes of Flexible Alias Protection.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: TOOLS
• Authors: Johan Östlund, Tobias Wrigstad, Dave Clarke, Beatrice Åkerblom
• Keywords: Little Additional Syntactic, Programming Languages, Single Programming Language, Systems Expressing Ownership, TOOLS 2008