Workshop Program

C remains a very widely used systems programming language, with many advantages: widely known, supported by many tools, good access to low-level hardware, etc. But C also makes it unnecessarily hard to produce safe and reliable programs, a particularly significant problem for systems and multi-threaded code. Modern languages address many of these issues, but porting existing code to a new language is often impractical for large systems. Static analyses of existing C code can find some problems, but guaranteeing safety is hampered by extensive use of unsafe features.

In the Ivy project, we have designed small extensions to C that address the classic problems of type and memory safety (Deputy and HeapSafe), and the increasingly important problem of data-sharing in threaded programs (SharC). All of these extensions require small, tractable changes to existing code, and have been validated on substantial code bases—a bootable Linux kernel for Deputy and HeapSafe, and several Linux-based threaded applications for SharC.

In this talk, I will concentrate on our application of Deputy (type safety) and HeapSafe (deallocation safety) to a Linux kernel, and on our more recent work on SharC (short for “Sharing Checker”) that allows a user to write lightweight annotations to declare how they believe objects are being shared between threads in their program.

David Gay obtained his PhD, on region-based memory management, from UC Berkeley in 2001. David was one of the designers and principal implementer of the nesC language, the C dialect used to implement the popular TinyOS sensor network operating system and its applications. More recently, David has been working on designing and implementing languages that make it easier to write correct sequential and parallel programs.