International Workshop on Aliasing, Confinement and Ownership in object-oriented programming (IWACO)

The power of objects lies in the flexibility of their interconnection structure. But this flexibility comes at a cost. Because an object can be modified via any alias, object-oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyse. Aliasing makes objects depend on their environment in unpredictable ways, breaking the encapsulation necessary for reliable software components, making it difficult to reason about and optimise programs, obscuring the flow of information between objects, and introducing security problems. Aliasing is a fundamental difficulty, but we accept its presence. Instead we seek techniques for describing, reasoning about, restricting, analysing, and preventing the connections between objects and/or the flow of information between them.

But how do we take arms against the sea of objects?

Topics the workshop aims to address include:

Schedule (with links to papers)

9:00-10:00 Invited Talk

            Separation and Confinement (1 hour)
                      Peter O'Hearn (Queen Mary, University of London)

10:00-10:30 Mini-Session (Chair: Jonathan Aldrich)

            Safe Runtime Downcasts with Ownership Types (20 Minutes)
                      Chandrasekhar Boyapati, Robert Lee, Martin Rinard

            Short Discussion

10:30-11:00 Break

11:00-12:30 Session 1 (Chair: Dave Naumann)

            Cheaper Reasoning With Ownership Types (20 Minutes)
                            Sophia Drossopoulou, Matthew Smith

            Formalising Eiffel References and Expanded Types in PVS (20 Minutes)
                            Richard Paige, Jonathon Ostroff, Phillip Brooke

            Connecting Effects and Uniqueness with Adoption (20 Minutes)
                            John Boyland

            Short Discussion

12:30-13:30 Lunch

13:30-15:00 Session 2 (Chair: Jan Vitek)
            Heap Monotonic Typestates (20 Minutes)
                      Manuel Fähndrich, K. Rustan M. Leino

            Towards a Model of Encapsulation (20 Minutes)
                      James Noble, Robert Biddle, Ewan Tempero, Alex Potanin, Dave Clarke

            Discussion

15:00-15:30 Break

15:30-17:00 Session 3 (Chair: Doug Lea)

            Lightweight Confinement for Featherweight Java (20 Minutes)
                      Tian Zhao, Jens Palsberg, Jan Vitek

            A Static Capability Tracking System (20 Minutes)
                      Scott F. Smith, Mark Thober

            Discussion