Visualising objects: Abstraction, encapsulation, aliasing, and ownership

Abstract

Each object in an object-oriented program can correspond to one abstraction in the program’s design. This correspondence makes visualising object-oriented programs easy: simply render each object in terms of its corresponding abstraction. Unfortunately, the endemic aliasing within object-oriented programs undermines this scheme, as an object’s state can depend on the transitive state of many other objects, which may be unknown to the visualisation system. By analysing programs to determine the extent of aliasing, we can construct visualisations to display aliasing directly, and can provide support for more abstract visualisations.