Read-Only Execution for Dynamic Languages

Supporting read-only and side effect free execution has been the focus of a large body of work in the area of statically typed programming languages. Read-onlyness in dynamically typed languages is difficult to achieve because of the absence of a type checking phase and the support of an open-world assumption in which code can be constantly added and modified. To address this issue, we propose Dynamic Read-Only references (DRO) that provide a view on an object where this object and its object graph are protected from modification. The readonly view dynamically propagates to aggregated objects, without changing the object graph itself; it acts as a read-only view of complex data structures, without making them read-only globally. We implement dynamic read-only references by using smart object proxies that lazily propagate the read-only view, following the object graph and driven by control flow and applied them to realize side-effect free assertions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: TOOLS
• Authors: Jean-Baptiste Arnaud, Marcus Denker, Stéphane Ducasse, Damien Pollet, Alexandre Bergel, Mathieu Suen
• Keywords: Dynamic Read-only References, Object Graph, Read-only View, TOOLS 2010