Welterweight Java

Abstract

This paper presents Welterweight Java (WJ), a new minimal core Java calculus intended to be a suitable starting point for investigations in the semantics of Java-like programs. To this end, WJ adds a few extra pounds to Featherweight Java. WJ is imperative and stateful, which is a frequent extension of Featherweight Java. To account for the importance of concurrency, WJ models Java's thread-based concurrency and lock-based synchronisation. The design of WJ is distilled from recent work on concurrent Java-like systems. We believe that the calculus is a good starting point for extensions. We illustrate the potential of the calculus by showing two extensions. The first is a version of WJ extended with deep ownership. This serves two purposes-it is a minimal formalisation of ownership, interesting in its own right, and shows how easily WJ can be extended. The second is a simple non-null types system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.