OASIcs.PLATEAU.2018.6.pdf
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Observing the Uptake of a Language Change Making Strings Immutable
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Manuel Maarek 
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9th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2018)
Series: Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs) - License:
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
- Publication Date: 2019-01-29
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Manuel Maarek. Observing the Uptake of a Language Change Making Strings Immutable. In 9th Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2018). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 67, pp. 6:1-6:8, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.PLATEAU.2018.6
Abstract
To address security concerns, a major change was introduced to the OCaml language and compiler which made strings immutable and introduced array of bytes as replacement for mutable strings. The change is progressively being pushed so that ultimately strings will be immutable. We have investigated the way OCaml package developers undertook the change. In this paper we report on a preliminary observation of software code from the main OCaml package management system. For this purpose we instrumented versions of the OCaml compiler to get precise information into the uptake of safe strings.
Subject Classification
ACM Subject Classification
- Software and its engineering → Software evolution
Keywords
- software evolution
- programming language evaluation
- immutability
- secure programming
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References
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