Generic Ownership A Practical Approach to Ownership and Confinement in Object-Oriented Programming Languages

Modern object-oriented programming languages support many techniques that simplify the work of a programmer. Among them is generic types: the ability to create generic descriptions of algorithms and object structures that will be automatically specialised by supplying the type information when they are used. At the same time, object-oriented technologies still suffer from the bad effects of aliasing: the case of many objects in a program’s memory referring to the same object via different references. Ownership types enforce encapsulation in object-oriented programs by ensuring that objects cannot be referred to from the outside of the object(s) that own them. Existing ownership programming languages either do not support generic types or attempt to add them on top of ownership restrictions. This thesis presents Generic Ownership which provides per-object ownership on top of a sound generic imperative language. Surprisingly, the resulting system not only provides ownership guarantees comparable to the established systems, but also requires few additional language mechanisms to achieve them due to full reuse of type genericity