A Type System for Reachability and Acyclicity

The desire for compile-time knowledge about the structure of heap contexts is currently increasing in many areas. However, approaches using whole program analysis are too weak in terms of both efficiency and accuracy. This paper presents a novel type system that enforces programmer-defined constraints on reachability via references or pointers, and restricts reference cycles to be within definable parts of the heap. Such constraints can be useful for program understanding and reasoning about effects and invariants, for information flow security, and for run-time optimizations and memory management.

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