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Formal Type Soundness for Cyclone's Region System

Author
Grossman, Dan; Morrisett, Greg,; Jim, Trevor; Hicks, Mike; Wang, Yanling; Cheney, James
Abstract
Cyclone is a polymorphic, type-safe programming language derived from C\@. The primary design goals of Cyclone are to let programmers control data representations and memory management without sacrificing type-safety. In this paper, we focus on the region-based memory management of Cyclone and its static typing discipline. The design incorporates several advancements, including support for region subtyping and a coherent integration with stack allocation and a garbage collector. To support separate compilation, Cyclone requires programmers to write some explicit region annotations, but uses a combination of default annotations, local type inference, and a novel treatment of region effects to reduce this burden. As a result, we integrate C idioms in a region-based framework. In our experience, porting legacy C to Cyclone has required altering about 8\% of the code; of the changes, only 6\% (of the 8\%) were region annotations. This technical report is really two documents in one: The first part is a paper submitted for publication in November, 2001. The second part is the full formal language and type-safety proof mentioned briefly in the first part. If you have already read a version of, ``Region-Based Memory Management in Cyclone'', then you should proceed directly to Section 9.
Date Issued
2001-11-30Publisher
Cornell University
Subject
computer science; technical report
Previously Published As
http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.cs/TR2001-1856
Type
technical report