Inferring types in Smalltalk

Suzuki, Norihisa

doi:10.1145/567532.567553

Cited by 80 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Suzuki [24] was the first to address the problem of type inference for such a language; his algorithm was not capable of checking most common programs, however. Later, Graver and Johnson [10,9] provided an algorithm for a simplified problem, where the types of instance variables must be specified by programmer so that only the types of arguments are to be inferred.…”

Section: The Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Making Type Inference Practical

Oxhøj

Palsberg

Schwartzbach

1992

DPB

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We present the implementation of a type inference algorithm for untyped object-oriented programs with inheritance, assignments, and late binding. The algorithm significantly improves our previous one, presented at OOPSLA'91, since it can handle collection classes, such as List, in a useful way. Also, the complexity has been dramatically improved, from exponential time to low polynomial time. The implementation uses the techniques of incremental graph construction and constraint template instantiation to avoid representing intermediate results, doing superfluous work, and recomputing type information. Experiments indicate that the implementation type checks as much as 100 lines pr. second. This results in a mature product, on which a number of tools can be based, for example a safety tool, an image compression tool, a code optimization tool, and an annotation tool. This may make type inference for object-oriented languages practical.

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Section: The Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Making Type Inference Practical

Oxhøj

Palsberg

Schwartzbach

1992

DPB

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“…COGs have been used extensively to analyze object-oriented programs [10,11,13]. Unfortunately, the polymorphism inherent to the object-oriented style of programming proves to be a serious problem since objects of the same class often are used with instance variables of different classes [10].…”

Section: Intmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Due to this "sticky" behaviour, the quality of the analysis will only deteriorate as the number of possible values increases. This problem, and specifically nilvalued instance variables, has marred previous attempts to provide a type system for object-oriented programs [10,11,13]. (Some authors have defined type-safety so that programs may legally send messages to nil [11].…”

Section: Creation Countsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Compile-time analysis of object-oriented programs

Vítek

Horspool

Uhl

1992

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Generation of efficient code for object-oriented programs requires knowledge of object lifetimes and method bindings. For object-oriented languages that have automatic storage management and dynamic look-up of methods, the compiler must obtain such knowledge by performing static analysis of the source code. We present an analysis algorithm which discovers the potential classes of each object in an object-oriented program as well as a safe approximation of their lifetimes. These results are obtained using abstract domains that approximate memory configurations and interprocedural call patterns of the program. We present several alternatives for these abstract domains that permit a trade-off between accuracy and complexity of the overall analysis.

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“…Ole Agesen's recent PhD thesis [2] contains a complete survey of related work. Reviewed systems range from purely theoretical ones [33] to systems in regular use by a large community [22], via partially implemented systems [29,30] and systems implemented on small languages [14,25].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reifying configuration management for object-oriented software

Jézéquel

Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Using a solid Software Configuration Management (SCM) is mandatory to establish and maintain the integrity of the products of a software project throughout the project's software life cycle. Even with the help of sophisticated tools, handling the various dimensions of SCM can be a daunting (and costly) task for many projects. The contribution of this paper is to propose a method (based on the use Creational Design Patterns) to simplify SCM by reifying the variants of an object-oriented software system into language-level objects; and to show that newly available compilation technology makes this proposal attractive with respect to performance (memory footprint and execution time) by inferring which classes are needed for a specific configuration and optimizing the generated code accordingly. We demonstrate this idea on an artificial case study intended to be representative of a properly designed OO software. All the performance figures we get are obtained with freely available software, and, since the source code of our case study is also freely available, they are easily reproducible and checkable.

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Inferring types in Smalltalk

Abstract: We thus concluded that wc need to introduc~"types"

Cited by 80 publications

References 11 publications

Making Type Inference Practical

Making Type Inference Practical

Compile-time analysis of object-oriented programs

Reifying configuration management for object-oriented software

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