7,482 papers · page 200 of 375
This paper presents F4F (Framework For Frameworks), a system for effective taint analysis of framework-based web applications. Most modern web applications utilize one or more web frameworks, which provide useful abstractions for common functionality. Due to extensive use of refl…
One of the main purposes of object initialisation is to establish invariants such as a field being non-null or an immutable data structure containing specific values. These invariants are then implicitly assumed by the rest of the implementation, for instance, to ensure that a fi…
Objects model the world, and state is fundamental to a faithful modeling. Engineers use state machines to understand and reason about state transitions, but programming languages provide little support for building software based on state abstractions. We propose Plaid, a languag…
We are trapped in a sequential prison. We use sequential character strings to write sequential programs to control sequential computers. No wonder concurrency remains elusive. How did we come to be here? The high cost of vacuum tube logic forced sequence upon early computer build…
High-coverage testing is challenging. Modern object-oriented programs present additional challenges for testing. One key difficulty is the generation of proper method sequences to construct desired objects as method parameters. In this paper, we cast the problem as an instance of…
Dynamic program optimizations are critical for the efficiency of applications in managed programming languages and scripting languages. Recent studies have shown that exploitation of program inputs may enhance the effectiveness of dynamic optimizations significantly. However, cur…
Exceptions are invaluable for structured error handling in high-level languages, but they are at odds with linear types. More generally, control effects may delete or duplicate portions of the stack, which, if we are not careful, can invalidate all substructural usage guarantees …
Parallelization transformations are an important vehicle for improving the performance and scalability of a software system. Utilizing concurrency requires that the developer first identify a suitable parallelization scope: one that poses as a performance bottleneck, and at the s…
Coordination can destroy scalability in parallel programming. A comprehensive library of scalable synchronization primitives is therefore an essential tool for exploiting parallelism. Unfortunately, such primitives do not easily combine to yield solutions to more complex problems…
Programming idioms, design patterns and application libraries often introduce cumbersome and repetitive boilerplate code to a software system. Language extensions and external DSLs (domain specific languages) are sometimes introduced to reduce the need for boilerplate code, but t…
Concurrency bugs are often due to inadequate synchronization that fail to prevent specific (undesirable) thread interleavings. Such errors, often referred to as Heisenbugs, are difficult to detect, prevent, and repair. In this paper, we present a new technique to increase program…
When optimizing large-scale applications, striking the balance between steady-state performance, start-up time, and code size has always been a grand challenge. While recent advances in trace compilation have significantly improved the steady-state performance of trace JITs for l…
Dynamic updates to running programs improve development productivity and reduce downtime of long-running applications. This feature is however severely limited in current virtual machines for object-oriented languages. In particular, changes to classes often apply only to methods…
Memory safety defends against inadvertent and malicious misuse of memory that may compromise program correctness and security. A critical element of memory safety is zero initialization. The direct cost of zero initialization is surprisingly high: up to 12.7%, with average costs …
Software construction today often involves the use of large frameworks. The challenge in this type of programming is that object-oriented frameworks tend to grow exceedingly intricate; they spread functionality among numerous classes, and any use of the framework requires knowled…
Variance allows the safe integration of parametric and subtype polymorphism. Two flavors of variance, definition-site versus use-site variance, have been studied and have had their merits hotly debated. Definition-site variance (as in Scala and C#) offers simple type-instantiatio…
When dealing with dynamic, untrusted content, such as on the Web, software behavior must be sandboxed, typically through use of a language like JavaScript. However, even for such specially-designed languages, it is difficult to ensure the safety of highly-optimized, dynamic langu…
Static analysis tools aim to find bugs in software that correspond to violations of specifications. Unfortunately, for large and complex software, these specifications are usually either unavailable or sophisticated, and hard to write.
Shared state access conflicts are one of the greatest sources of error for fine grained parallelism in any domain. Notoriously hard to debug, these conflicts reduce reliability and increase development time. The standard task graph model dictates that tasks with potential conflic…
Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) is the key technology behind cross-platform virtualization and allows software compiled for one Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) to be executed on a processor supporting a different ISA. Under the hood, DBT is typically implemented using Just-In…