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9th IWACO International Workshop on Aliasing, Capabilities and Ownership (IWACO)
In connection with ECOOP in July (Date to be decided)
Due to Covid-19, IWACO will be fully virtual. All participation will be online.
## Important Dates
Paper submission: May 8th, 2020 (Updated)
Notification: May 29th, 2020
Final version: TBD
Workshop: TBD
(All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth)
## Aim and Scope
Stable object identity and shared mutable state are two powerful principles in
programming. The ability to create multiple aliases to mutable data allows a
direct modelling of sharing that occurs naturally in a domain, and lies at the
heart of efficient programming patterns where aliases provide shortcuts to key
places in a data structure. However, aliasing is also the cause of low-level
bugs which are notoriously hard to debug, where a change through one alias may
cause unforeseen changes visible through another alias. These problems are
exacerbated in a concurrent setting, where aliasing is at the root of data
races with multiple threads mutating shared memory simultaneously.
Coping with pointers, aliasing and the proliferation of shared mutable state is
a problem that crosscuts the software development stack, from compilers and
runtimes to bug-finding tools and end-user software. They complicate modular
reasoning and program analysis, efficient code generation, efficient use of
memory, and obfuscate program logic.
Several techniques have been introduced to describe and reason about stateful
programs, and to restrict, analyze, and prevent aliases. These include various
forms of ownership types, capabilities, separation logic, linear logic,
uniqueness, sharing control, escape analysis, argument independence, read-only
references, linear references, effect systems, and access control mechanisms.
These tools have found their way into type systems, compilers and interpreters,
runtime systems and bug-finding tools.
IWACO’20 will focus on these techniques, on how they can be used to reason
about stateful (sequential or concurrent) programs, and how they have been
applied to programming languages. In particular, we will consider papers on:
- models, type systems and other formal systems, programming language
mechanisms, analysis and design techniques, patterns and notations for
expressing ownership, aliasing, capabilities, uniqueness, and related topics;
- empirical studies of programs or experience reports from programming systems
designed with these techniques in mind;
- programming logics that deal with aliasing and/or shared state, or use
ownership, capabilities or resourcing;
- applications of capabilities, ownership and other similar type systems in
low-level systems such as programming languages runtimes, virtual machines, or
compilers; and
- optimization techniques, analysis algorithms, libraries, applications, and
novel approaches exploiting ownership, aliasing, capabilities, uniqueness, and
related topics.
## Submissions
Contributions may be submitted in two formats:
- Short papers (up to 3 pages, excluding references and clearly marked
appendices) describing new ideas and open questions for discussion.
- Full papers (up to 8 pages, excluding references and clearly marked
appendices) describing (preliminary) research results.
Submissions must be in English and must use the LIPIcs template
(https://submission.dagstuhl.de/documentation/authors#lipics).
Papers must be submitted via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwaco2020
by May 8th.
Full papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, which will be
archived in the ACM digital library.
## Organizing Committee
Elias Castegren (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Aaron Weiss (Northeastern University, USA)
## Workshop Program committee
Dominique Devriese (Vrije Universiteit, Belgium)
Juliana Franco (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK)
Ralf Jung (MPI-SWS, Germany)
Neel Krishnaswami (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK)
Guillaume Munch-Maccagnoni (Inria, France)
Marianna Rapoport (University of Waterloo, Canada)
