Open Access Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington
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Object Cloning for Ownership Systems

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posted on 2021-11-15, 10:39 authored by Li, Paley Guangping

Modern object-oriented programming languages frequently need the ability to clone, duplicate, and copy objects. The usual approaches taken by languages are rudimentary, primarily because these approaches operate with little understanding of the object being cloned. Deep cloning naively copies every object that has a reachable reference path from the object being cloned, even if the objects being copied have no innate relationship with that object. For more sophisticated cloning operations, languages usually only provide the capacity for programmers to define their own cloning operations for specific objects, and with no help from the type system.  Sheep cloning is an automated operation that clones objects by leveraging information about those objects’ structures, which the programmer imparts into their programs with ownership types. Ownership types are a language mechanism that defines an owner for every object in the program. Ownership types create a hierarchical structure for the heap.  In this thesis, we construct an extensible formal model for an object-oriented language with ownership types (Core), and use it to explore different formalisms of sheep cloning. We formalise three distinct operational semantics of sheep cloning, and for each approach we include proofs or proof outlines where appropriate, and provide a comparative analysis of each model’s benefits. Our main contribution is the descripSC formal model of sheep cloning and its proof of type soundness.  The second contribution of this thesis is the formalism of Mojo-jojo, a multiple ownership system that includes existential quantification over types and context parameters, along with a constraint system for context parameters. We prove type soundness for Mojo-jojo. Multiple ownership is a mechanism which allows objects to have more than one owner. Context parameters in Mojo-jojo can use binary operators such as: intersection, union, and disjointness.

History

Copyright Date

2015-01-01

Date of Award

2015-01-01

Publisher

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Rights License

Author Retains Copyright

Degree Discipline

Engineering

Degree Grantor

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Degree Level

Doctoral

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

ANZSRC Type Of Activity code

970108 Expanding Knowledge in the Information and Computing Sciences

Victoria University of Wellington Item Type

Awarded Doctoral Thesis

Language

en_NZ

Victoria University of Wellington School

School of Engineering and Computer Science

Advisors

Noble, James