Type safety analysis for dart

TY - GEN

T1 - Type safety analysis for dart

AU - Heinze, Thomas S.

AU - Møller, Anders

AU - Strocco, Fabio

PY - 2016/11/1

Y1 - 2016/11/1

N2 - Optional typing is traditionally viewed as a compromise between static and dynamic type checking, where code without type annotations is not checked until runtime. We demonstrate that optional type annotations in Dart programs can be integrated into a flow analysis to provide static type safety guarantees both for annotated and non-annotated parts of the code. We explore two approaches: one that uses type annotations for filtering, and one that uses them as specifications. What makes this particularly challenging for Dart is that its type system is unsound even for fully annotated code. Experimental results show that the technique is remarkably effective, even without context sensitivity: 99:3% of all property lookup operations are reported type safe in a collection of benchmark programs.

AB - Optional typing is traditionally viewed as a compromise between static and dynamic type checking, where code without type annotations is not checked until runtime. We demonstrate that optional type annotations in Dart programs can be integrated into a flow analysis to provide static type safety guarantees both for annotated and non-annotated parts of the code. We explore two approaches: one that uses type annotations for filtering, and one that uses them as specifications. What makes this particularly challenging for Dart is that its type system is unsound even for fully annotated code. Experimental results show that the technique is remarkably effective, even without context sensitivity: 99:3% of all property lookup operations are reported type safe in a collection of benchmark programs.

KW - Optional types

KW - Static analysis

KW - Type systems

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85002157865

U2 - 10.1145/2989225.2989226

DO - 10.1145/2989225.2989226

M3 - Article in proceedings

AN - SCOPUS:85002157865

SN - 978-1-4503-4445-6

SP - 1

EP - 12

BT - DLS 2016 - Proceedings of the 12th Symposium on Dynamic Languages

A2 - Ierusalimschy, Roberto

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

T2 - SPLASH 2016

Y2 - 30 October 2016 through 4 November 2016

ER -