Component Technology for Pointers: Why and How

Key software engineering questions concerning ease of understanding, reasoning, and efficient and predictable performance can be traced to the use of pointers in imperative programming languages. In this paper we apply modern component technology to pointers and, as a result, take an important step towards addressing these questions at a foundational level. We present a formal specification for a component that captures the complex behavior of pointers. The specification provides programmers with a precise mathematical abstraction for understanding pointer behavior, and enables sound and systematic reasoning about pointer-based data structures. The specification is designed to be implementation-neutral. Alternative implementations of the specification can be plugged in to give programmers the flexibility to choose manual memory management or automatic garbage collection depending on their performance concerns.

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