Enforcing high-level protocols in low-level software
- Robert DeLIne ,
- Manuel Fahndrich
Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) |
Published by ACM
The reliability of infrastructure software, such as operating systems and web servers, is often hampered by the mismanagement of resources, such as memory and network connections. The Vault programming language allows a programmer to describe resource management protocols that the compiler can statically enforce. Such a protocol can specify that operations must be performed in a certain order and that certain operations must be performed before accessing a given data object. Furthermore, Vault enforces statically that resources cannot be leaked. We validate the utility of our approach by enforcing protocols present in the interface between the Windows 2000 kernel and its device drivers.
Copyright © 2001 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library -http://www.acm.org/dl/.