OwnKit: Inferring Modularly Checkable Ownership Annotations for Java

Abstract

Ownership and related systems impose restrictions on the object graph that can help improve program structure, exploit concurrency and verify software. Such systems rely on the presence of appropriate ownership annotations in the source code. Unfortunately, manually adding ownership annotations to legacy systems is a tedious process. Previous attempts at automatically inferring such ownership systems do not produce modularly checkable annotations (i.e. which allow classes to be checked in isolation) making them difficult to incorporate into day-to-day development. In this paper, we present Own Kit - a system for automatically inferring ownership annotations which are modularly checkable. We describe and evaluate our approach on a number of real-world benchmarks and compare against an existing system.