Fuel: A Compiler Framework for Safe Memory Management

Abstract

Flow-sensitive type systems offer an elegant way to ensure memory-safety in programming languages. Unfortunately, their adoption in new or existing languages is often hindered by a painful effort to implement or integrate them into compilers. This paper presents early results in our effort to alleviate this task. We introduce Fuel, a type capability-based library that can be plugged onto a compiler toolchain to check for memory-safety properties. Fuel builds upon well-established ideas in the domain of capability-based system, and adds a mechanism leveraging dynamic checks to recover capabilities where static reasoning is either too difficult or impossible. This approach allows the analysis to potentially cover situations where a typical type system might not be expressive enough to statically reason about memory safety.