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Immutability specification and its applications
Author(s) -
Pechtchanski Igor,
Sarkar Vivek
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.853
Subject(s) - immutability , computer science , assertion , benchmark (surveying) , context (archaeology) , programming language , reachability , set (abstract data type) , exploit , code (set theory) , theoretical computer science , paleontology , computer security , geodesy , blockchain , biology , geography
A location is said to be immutable if its value and the values of selected locations reachable from it are guaranteed to remain unchanged during a specified time interval. We introduce a framework for immutability specification , and discuss its application to code optimization . Compared with a final declaration, an immutability assertion in our framework can express a richer set of immutability properties along three dimensions— lifetime , reachability and context . We present a framework for processing and verifying immutability annotations in Java, as well as extending optimizations so as to exploit immutability information. Preliminary experimental results show that a significant number (61%) of read accesses could potentially be classified as immutable in our framework. Further, use of immutability information yields substantial reductions (33–99%) in the number of dynamic read accesses, and also measurable speedups in the range of 5–10% for certain benchmark programs. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.