[jmm-dev] safety

Alan Jeffrey ajeffrey at bell-labs.com
Wed Mar 19 23:48:23 UTC 2014


It seems that a lot of these points follow from the soundness of 
rely/guarantee reasoning. For example type safety follows since each 
thread relies on and guarantees heap type safety, and basic type safety 
follows pretty directly from heap type safety.

A.

PS: Seems kind of appropriate for the week of Lamport's Turing Award.

On 03/19/2014 01:57 PM, Doug Lea wrote:
>
> Here's a paste from John Rose's blog post from a few days ago
> (https://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/the_isthmus_in_the_vm)
> that expands on some of the C vs Java differences impacting
> memory models we discussed in January. Nothing here should be
> surprising, but it includes a couple of minor points not
> mentioned in those discussions.
>
> -Doug
>
> ...
>
>      basic type safety: Pointers, integers, and floats must not be
> confused; conversions must be explicit and must preserve VM integrity.
> This applies to values of all kinds, in memory and elsewhere.
>
>      basic operation safety: Any basic VM operation either completes
> according its specification, or produces a catchable exception. It
> cannot corrupt memory or any other VM state.
>
>      class safety: Pointer conversions must be explicit and checked.
> There are exceptions for conversion to a Java superclass (which is
> always safe), to a Java interface (which is always checked later at any
> use point), and to an erased generic type (which is checked implicitly).
>
>      storage lifetime safety: No block of memory can be accessed after
> it has been deallocated. This is why we have automatic storage management.
>
>      variable domain safety: There is no way to obtain “garbage” or
> indeterminately initialized values of any type (especially pointers, of
> course).
>
>      API type checking: Every use of an API, such as a method call, is
> fully type-consistent with its definition (such has a method
> definition). This requirement serves the earlier ones, of course; it
> shows up in detail in the operation of Java’s dynamic linkage rules.
>
>      late linking: All uses of names, including class, method, and field
> names, are resolved and access-checked not only at compile time but also
> at run time. Separately compiled modules (classes) cannot observe the
> implementation details of other modules.
>
>      concurrency safety: Race conditions between threads can be
> prevented, or their effects can be predicted usefully, or (at worst)
> they cannot violate the other safety invariants.
>
>      error manifestation: Exceptional or erroneous conditions are not
> discarded. They are manifested as thrown exceptions, which will be
> caught and/or displayed.
>
>      access control: Non-public or otherwise restricted API points
> cannot be accessed except by their specified users. Access is enforced
> at all phases of compilation and execution. System internals cannot be
> touched except by highly trusted code.
>
>      appropriately concise: Typically, Java code does not pay for any of
> Java’s built-in safety features by unnecessary verbosity. Safe and sane
> practices are encouraged by simpler notations. The “semantic payload” of
> a bit of code is not obscured by any necessary ceremony. (But note next
> points.)
>
>      predictably explicit: Typically, complex or potentially expensive
> features of Java are made explicit by a visible syntax, such as a method
> call. (This point is in tension with the previous point, and reasonable
> people differ on the proper resolution.)
>
>      explicit types: Java code has reasonably strong static typing, with
> many types explicitly written in the source code. (Notably, declaration
> types are explicit on the left, despite type inference elsewhere.) This
> feature catches errors early and gives IDEs helpful context for each name.
>
>      transparent code: Programs are represented using bytecode, which
> automated tools can inspect, verify, and transform. User-written
> annotations can help guide these tasks. There are easy to use, open
> source implementations of offline processors for both source code and
> bytecode, as well as the VM itself. Multiple good IDEs exist.
>
>      transparent data: Data can be inspected using reflection and other
> ubiquitous self-description machinery such as toString and debuggers.
> (Transparency of data is balanced with access control, of course.)
>
>      robust performance: With moderate programmer care and experience,
> simple single-threaded programs tend to not show surprising performance
> “potholes”, not even when they are composed together. Multi-threaded
> programs preserve and scale up throughput with additional CPUs, in the
> absence of algorithmic bottlenecks.
>
>


More information about the jmm-dev mailing list