NDLI: Automatic inference of stationary fields:a generalization of java's final fields

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Lam, Monica S. Unkel, Christopher
Abstract	Java programmers can document that the relationship between two objects is unchanging by declaring the field that encodes that relationship to be final. This information can be used in program understanding and detection of errors in new code additions. Unfortunately, few fields in programs are actually declared final. Programs often contain fields that could be final, but are not declared so. Moreover, the definition of final has restrictions on initializationthat limit its applicability. We introduce stationary fields as a generalization of final. A field in a program is stationary if, for every object that contains it, all writes to the field occur before all the reads. Unlike the definition of final fields, there can be multiple writes during initialization, and initialization can span multiple methods. We have developed an efficient algorithm for inferring which fields are stationary in a program, based on the observation that many fields acquire their value very close to object creation. We presume that an object's initialization phase has concluded when its reference is saved in some heap object. We perform precise analysis only regarding recently created objects. Applying our algorithm to real-world Java programs demonstrates that stationary fields are more common than final fields: 44-59% vs. 11-17% respectively in our benchmarks. These surprising results have several significant implications. First, substantial portions of Java programs appear to be written in a functional style. Second, initialization of these fields occurs very close to object creation, when very good alias information is available. These results open the door for more accurate and efficient pointer alias analysis.
Starting Page	183
Ending Page	195
Page Count	13
File Format	PDF
ISSN	03621340 15581160
DOI	10.1145/1328897.1328463
Journal	ACM SIGPLAN Notices (SIGP)
Volume Number	43
Issue Number	1
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	1983-05-01
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Initialization Java Stationary Final
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design Software

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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