Article

Understanding the impact of collection contracts on design

Authors:

Stephen Nelson,

David J. Pearce,

James NobleAuthors Info & Claims

TOOLS'10: Proceedings of the 48th international conference on Objects, models, components, patterns

Pages 61 - 78

Published: 28 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Java provides a specification for a user-defined general purpose equivalence operator for objects, but collections such as Set have more stringent requirements. This inconsistency breaks polymorphism: programmers must take care to follow Set's contract rather than the more general Object contract if their object could enter a Set. We have dynamically profiled 30 Java applications to better understand the way programmers design their objects, to determine whether they program with collections in mind. Our results indicate that objects which enter collections behave very differently to objects which do not. Our findings should help developers understand the impact of design choices they make, and guide future language designers when adding support for collections and/or equality.

References

[1]

Nelson, S., Pearce, D.J., Noble, J.: Understanding the impact of collection contracts on design. Technical Report 10-09, School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (2010).

[2]

Chan, P., Lee, R.: The Java Class Libraries, 2nd edn., vol. 1. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1999).

[3]

Hovemeyer, D., Pugh, W.: Finding bugs is easy. In: OOPSLA Companion (2004).

Digital Library

[4]

Qualitas Research Group: Qualitas corpus release 20080603. The University of Auckland (2008), http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ewan/corpus/

[5]

Khoshafian, S.N., Copeland, G.P.: Object identity. In: Proc. OOPSLA (1986).

Digital Library

[6]

Birtwistle, G.M., Dahl, O.J., Myhrhaug, B., Nygaard, K.: Simula Begin. Studentlitteratur (1979).

Digital Library

[7]

Goldberg, A., Robson, D.: Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1983).

Digital Library

[8]

MacLennan, B.J.: Values and objects in programming languages. SIGPLAN Notices 17(12), 70-79 (1982).

Digital Library

[9]

Baker, H.G.: Equal rights for functional objects or, the more things change, the more they are the same. In: OOPS Messenger, vol. 4(4) (1993).

Digital Library

[10]

Steele, G.L.: Common Lisp the Language, 2nd edn. Digital Press (1990).

Digital Library

[11]

Grogono, P., Sakkinen, M.: Copying and comparing: Problems and solutions. In: Bertino, E. (ed.) ECOOP 2000. LNCS, vol. 1850, pp. 226-250. Springer, Heidelberg (2000).

Digital Library

[12]

Vaziri, M., Tip, F., Fink, S., Dolby, J.: Declarative object identity using relation types. In: Ernst, E. (ed.) ECOOP 2007. LNCS, vol. 4609, pp. 54-78. Springer, Heidelberg (2007).

Digital Library

[13]

Rupakheti, C.R., Hou, D.: An empirical study of the design and implementation of object equality in Java. In: Proc. CASCON, p. 9 (2008).

Digital Library

[14]

Liskov, B., Guttag, J.V.: Abstraction and Specification in Program Development. MIT Press/McGraw-Hill (1986).

Digital Library

[15]

Odersky, M.: Programming in Scala. Artima, Inc. (2008).

[16]

Zibin, Y., Potanin, A., Ali, M., Artzi, S., Kiezun, A., Ernst, M.D.: Object and reference immutability using Java generics. In: ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE, pp. 75-84 (2007).

Digital Library

[17]

Östlund, J., Wrigstad, T., Clarke, D., Åkerblom, B.: Ownership, uniqueness, and immutability. In: TOOLS, vol. (46), pp. 178-197 (2008).

[18]

Fähndrich, M., Xia, S.: Establishing object invariants with delayed types. In: Proc. OOPSLA, pp. 337-350 (2007).

Digital Library

[19]

Haack, C., Poll, E.: Type-based object immutability with flexible initialization. Technical Report ICIS-R09001, Radboud University Nijmegen (January 2009).

[20]

Leino, K.R.M., Müller, P., Wallenburg, A.: Flexible immutability with frozen objects. In: VSTTE, pp. 192-208 (2008).

Digital Library

[21]

Qi, X., Myers, A.C.: Masked types for sound object initialization. In: POPL, pp. 53-65 (2009).

Digital Library

[22]

Gil, J., Shragai, T.: Are we ready for a safer construction environment? In: Drossopoulou, S. (ed.) ECOOP 2009 - Object-Oriented Programming. LNCS, vol. 5653, pp. 495-519. Springer, Heidelberg (to appear, 2009).

Digital Library

[23]

Unkel, C., Lam, M.S.: Automatic inference of stationary fields: a generalization of Java's final fields. In: POPL, pp. 183-195 (2008).

Digital Library

[24]

Porat, S., Biberstein, M., Koved, L., Mendelson, B.: Automatic detection of immutable fields in Java. In: Proc. CASCON (1990).

Digital Library

[25]

Bloch, J.: Effective Java. Prentice Hall PTR, Englewood Cliffs (2008).

Digital Library

[26]

Cheng, P., Harper, R., Lee, P.: Generational stack collection and profile-driven pretenuring. In: Proc. of the ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp. 162-173. ACM Press, New York (1998).

Digital Library

[27]

Agesen, O., Garthwaite, A.: Efficient object sampling via weak references. In: Proc. ISMM, pp. 121-126. ACM Press, New York (2000).

Digital Library

[28]

Jump, M., Blackburn, S.M., McKinley, K.S.: Dynamic object sampling for pretenuring. In: Diwan, A. (ed.) Proc. ISMM. ACM Press, New York (2004).

Digital Library

[29]

Singer, J., Brown, G., Lujan, M., Watson, I.: Towards intelligent analysis techniques for object pretenuring. In: Principles and Practice of Programming in Java, Lisbon, September 2007. ACM Press, New York (2007).

Digital Library

[30]

Hirzel,M., Henkel, J., Diwan, A., Hind, M.: Understanding the connectivity of heap objects. In: Proc. ISMM, pp. 143-156 (2002).

Digital Library

[31]

Inoue, H., Stefanovic, D., Forrest, S.: On the prediction of Java object lifetimes. IEEE Trans. Computers 55(7), 880-892 (2006).

Digital Library

[32]

Chen, G., Kandemir, M., Vijaykrishnan, N., Irwin, M.J.: Field level analysis for heap space optimization in embedded Java environments. In: Diwan, A. (ed.) ISMM'04 Proc. of the Fourth International Symposium on Memory Management, Vancouver, October 2004. ACM Press, New York (2004).

Digital Library

[33]

Guo, Z., Amaral, J.N., Szafron, D., Wang, Y.: Utilizing field usage patterns for java heap space optimization. In: Proc. of the conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research, pp. 67-79. IBM (2006).

Digital Library

[34]

Shankar, A., Arnold, M., Bodik, R.: Jolt: Lightweight dynamic analysis and removal of object churn. In: Proc. OOPSLA, pp. 127-142. ACM Press, New York (2008).

Digital Library

[35]

Dieckman, S., Hoelzle, U.: A study of the allocation behavior of the SPECjvm98 Java benchmarks. In: Guerraoui, R. (ed.) ECOOP 1999. LNCS, vol. 1628, pp. 92-115. Springer, Heidelberg (1999).

Digital Library

[36]

Pearce, D.J., Webster, M., Berry, R., Kelly, P.H.J.: Profiling with AspectJ. Software: Pracice and Experience 37(7), 747-777 (2007).

Digital Library

[37]

Röjemo, N., Runciman, C.: Lag, drag, void and use -- heap profiling and space-efficient compilation revisited. In: Proc. ICFP, pp. 34-41. ACM Press, New York (1996).

Digital Library

[38]

Shaham, R., Kolodner, E.K., Sagiv, M.: Heap profiling for space-efficient Java. In: Proc. PLDI, pp. 104-113. ACM Press, New York (2001).

Digital Library

[39]

Marinov, D., O'Callahan, R.: Object equality profiling. SIGPLAN Not. 38(11), 313-325 (2003).

Digital Library

[40]

Mitchell, N.: The runtime structure of object ownership. In: Thomas, D. (ed.) ECOOP 2006. LNCS, vol. 4067, pp. 74-98. Springer, Heidelberg (2006).

Digital Library

[41]

Liang, S., Viswanathan, D.: Comprehensive profiling support in the Java Virtual Machine. In: Proc. of the USENIX Conference On Object Oriented Technologies and Systems, pp. 229-240. USENIX Association (1999).

Digital Library

[42]

Potanin, A., Noble, J., Frean, M.R., Biddle, R.: Scale-free geometry in OO programs. Communications of the ACM 48(5), 99-103 (2005).

Digital Library

[43]

Orwell, G.: Animal Farm. Secker & Warburg (1945).

Cited By

Sofiato BSiqueira Fde Azevedo Rocha RCavalcante EDantas FBatista T(2020)Towards an order-aware object comparisonProceedings of the 24th Brazilian Symposium on Context-Oriented Programming and Advanced Modularity10.1145/3427081.3427090(64-71)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3427081.3427090
Noble JBlack ABruce KHomer MMiller MVisser EMurphy-Hill ELopes C(2016)The left hand of equalsProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986031(224-237)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2986012.2986031

Recommendations

Age-based garbage collection

Modern generational garbage collectors look for garbage among the young objects, because they have high mortality; however, these objects include the very youngest objects, which clearly are still live. We introduce new garbage collection algorithms, ...
Age-based garbage collection
OOPSLA '99: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications

Modern generational garbage collectors look for garbage among the young objects, because they have high mortality; however, these objects include the very youngest objects, which clearly are still live. We introduce new garbage collection algorithms, ...
Understanding Collection Understanding with Collage
ICADL 08: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries: Universal and Ubiquitous Access to Information

A streaming collage visualization of images extracted from the collection's documents has been proposed as an effective tool for gaining a comprehensive overview of a digital library collection ("collection understanding"). A qualitative study provides ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

TOOLS'10: Proceedings of the 48th international conference on Objects, models, components, patterns

June 2010

310 pages

ISBN:3642139523

Editor:
Jan Vitek
Purdue University, Computer Science, West Lafayette, IN

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 28 June 2010

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
0
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 25 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Sofiato BSiqueira Fde Azevedo Rocha RCavalcante EDantas FBatista T(2020)Towards an order-aware object comparisonProceedings of the 24th Brazilian Symposium on Context-Oriented Programming and Advanced Modularity10.1145/3427081.3427090(64-71)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3427081.3427090
Noble JBlack ABruce KHomer MMiller MVisser EMurphy-Hill ELopes C(2016)The left hand of equalsProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/2986012.2986031(224-237)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2986012.2986031

View Options

View options

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents