2026-07-23T17:33:49Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:6102 2024-03-06T10:37:59Z ddc:004 open_access

C++ const and Immutability: An Empirical Study of Writes-Through-const Eyolfson, Jon Lam, Patrick empirical study dynamic analysis immutability The ability to specify immutability in a programming language is a powerful tool for developers, enabling them to better understand and more safely transform their code without fearing unintended changes to program state. The C++ programming language allows developers to specify a form of immutability using the const keyword. In this work, we characterize the meaning of the C++ const qualifier and present the ConstSanitizer tool, which dynamically verifies a stricter form of immutability than that defined in C++: it identifies const uses that are either not consistent with transitive immutability, that write to mutable fields, or that write to formerly-const objects whose const-ness has been cast away. We evaluate a set of 7 C++ benchmark programs to find writes-through-const, establish root causes for how they fail to respect our stricter definition of immutability, and assign attributes to each write (namely: synchronized, not visible, buffer/cache, delayed initialization, and incorrect). ConstSanitizer finds 17 archetypes for writes in these programs which do not respect our version of immutability. Over half of these seem unnecessary to us. Our classification and observations of behaviour in practice contribute to the understanding of a widely-used C++ language feature. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Jon Eyolfson and Patrick Lam 2016 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 56, 30th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2016) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.8 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-61024 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.8 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode