Typing safe deallocation

Abstract

In this work we address the problem of proving, by static analysis means, that allocating and deallocating regions in the store provides a safe way to achieve memory management. That is, the goal is to provably ensure that a program does not use pointers into a deallocated region. A well-known approach to this problem is the one of Tofte and Talpin. Our first contribution is to provide a simple proof, by means of a subject reduction property, of type safety for their region calculus. Our second, main contribution is that we actually do this for an extension of Tofte-Talpin's calculus, featuring a primitive construct for deallocating regions, similar to C's free, that allows one to circumvent the strict stack-of-regions discipline enforced in Tofte-Talpin's calculus. Our static analysis consists in a novel type and effect system, extending the one of Tofte and Talpin, where we record deallocation effects. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.