Structural Lock Correlation with Ownership Types

Concurrent object-oriented programming languages coordinate conflicting memory accesses through locking, which relies on programmer discipline and suffers from a lack of modularity and compile-time support. Programmers typically work with large libraries of code whose locking behaviours are not formally and precisely specified; thus understanding and writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult and error-prone. This paper proposes structural lock correlation, a new model for establishing structural connections between locks and the memory locations they protect, in an ownership-based type and effect system. Structural lock correlation enables modular specification of locking. It offers a compiler-checkable lock abstraction with an enforceable contract at interface boundaries, leading to improved safety, understandability and composability of concurrent program components.