Heap Slicing Using Type Systems

Abstract

AbstractUsing type systems, this paper treats heap slicing which is a technique transforming a program into a new one that produces the same result while working on a heap sliced into independent regions. Heap slicing is a common approach to handle the problem of modifying the heap layout without changing the program semantics. Heap slicing has applications in the areas of performance optimization and security.Towards solving the problem of heap slicing, this paper introduces three type systems. The first type system does a pointer analysis and annotates program points with pointer information. This type system is an augmentation of a previously developed type system by the author. The second type system does a region analysis and refines the result of the first type system by augmenting the pointer information with region information. The region information approximately specifies at each program point for each memory cell the region where the cell exists. The third type system uses the information gathered by the region type system to do the principal transformation of heap slicing.The paper also presents two operational semantics; one for single-region heap scenario and the other for multi-regions heap scenario. These semantics are used to prove the soundness of the type systems.Keywordsheap slicingtype systemssemantics of programming languagesoperational semanticsregion analysispointer analysis