Inferring Method Effect Summaries for Nested Heap Regions

Effect systems are important for reasoning about the side effects of a program. Although effect systems have been around for decades, they have not been widely adopted in practice because of the large number of annotations that they require. A tool that infers effects automatically can make effect systems practical. We present an effect inference algorithm and an Eclipse plugin, DPJIZER, that alleviate the burden of writing effect annotations for a language called Deterministic Parallel Java (DPJ). The key novel feature of the algorithm is the ability to infer effects on nested heap regions. Besides DPJ, we also illustrate how the algorithm can be used for a different effect system based on object ownership. Our experience shows that DPJIZER is both useful and effective: inferring effects annotations automatically saves significant programming burden; and inferred effects are comparable to those in manually-annotated programs, while in many cases they are more accurate.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: KBSE
• Authors: Mohsen Vakilian, Danny Dig, Robert L. Bocchino Jr., Jeffrey Overbey, Vikram S. Adve, Ralph Johnson
• Keywords: Effect Annotations, Effect Inference Algorithm, Effect System, KBSE 2009, Software Engineering