Establishing Object Invariants with Delayed Types

posted by  jhorra (5)  16 months ago (research.microsoft.com)

Mainstream object-oriented languages such as C# and Java provide an initializationmodel for objects that does not guarantee programmer controlled initialization of fields. Instead, all fields are initialized to default values (0 for scalars and null for non-scalars) on allocation. This is in stark contrast to functional languages, where all parts of an allocation are initialized to programmer-provided values. These choices have a direct impact on two main issues: 1) the prevalence of null in