Read-Only Execution for Dynamic Languages

International audienceSupportingread-onlyandsideeffectfreeexecutionhasbeenthefocus 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 read- only 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.Pas de résumé en francai