I just uploaded a new Technical Report. The report (currently under submission) describes a novel typestate analysis, called Nop-Shadows Analysis, that I implemented for my doctoral dissertation. The analysis is certainly one of my dissertation’s major technical contributions. I implemented the Nop-Shadows Analysis in the Clara framework, which means that you are welcome to download it, try it out or extend it.
In my doctoral dissertation (click here for a draft), I present Clara (Compile-time Approximation of Runtime Analyses), a novel research framework for the implementation of hybrid typestate analyses. Clara is now online – fully documented – at: http://www.bodden.de/clara/
Typestate properties aid program understanding, and one can even define type systems that prevent programmers from causing typestate errors, or derive static typestate analyses that try to determine whether a given program violates typestate properties. Unfortunately, the typestate-analysis problem is generally undecidable. Researchers have therefore proposed a hybrid approach that uses
static-analysis results to generate a residual runtime monitor. This monitor captures actual property violations as they occur, but only updates its internal state at relevant statements, as determined through static analysis.
Today, when I installed MacOS X Leopard, I was surprised to see that the update had remove Java 5 from the disk! The “1.5” folder now is just a symbolic link to the 1.6 JDK! Where is the sense in that? I guess I am not the only developer who just needs a 1.5 JDK from time to time. I don’t care about the old VM but I do care about the old class libraries. When using Java 6 libraries to develop Java 5 compatible code it can easily happen that one uses APIs that were not available in 1.5. Luckily I had time machine set up, so it was easy to get back the “real JDK”. No wonder they save so much disk space in Snow Leopard …
