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Practical Void Safety

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Verified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments (VSTTE 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10712))

Abstract

Null pointer dereferencing remains one of the major issues in modern object-oriented languages. An obvious addition of keywords to distinguish between never null and possibly null references appears to be insufficient during object initialization when some fields declared as never null may be temporary null before the initialization completes. Unlike all previous publications on the subject, this work avoids explicit encoding of these intermediate states in programs in favor of statically checked validity rules that do not depend on special conditionally non-null types. I review all object initialization examples proposed earlier and I suggest new ones to compare applicability of different approaches. I demonstrate the usability of the proposed scheme on open-source libraries with a million lines of code that were converted to satisfy the rules.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://cve.mitre.org/ (visited on 2017-08-29).

  2. 2.

    The Checker Framework 2.1.10, (2017). https://checkerframework.org/ (visited on 2017-05-08).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Independent scientist, Podolsk, Russia

    Alexander Kogtenkov

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  1. Alexander Kogtenkov
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Correspondence to Alexander Kogtenkov .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Paris-Sud University, Orsay, France

    Andrei Paskevich

  2. New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Thomas Wies

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Kogtenkov, A. (2017). Practical Void Safety. In: Paskevich, A., Wies, T. (eds) Verified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments. VSTTE 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10712. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72308-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72308-2_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72307-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72308-2

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