This paper presents Proteus, a core calculus that models dynamic software updating, a service for fixing bugs and adding features to a running program. Proteus permits a program's type structure to change dynamically but guarantees the updated program remains type-correct by ensuring a property we call ``con-freeness.'' We show how con-freeness can be enforced dynamically, and how it can be approximated via a novel static analysis. This analysis can be used to assess the implications of a program's structure on future updates, to make update success more predictable. We have implemented Proteus for C, and briefly discuss our implementation, which we have tested on several well-known programs.
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@ARTICLE{StoyleHBSN06,
AUTHOR = {Gareth Stoyle and Michael Hicks and Gavin Bierman and Peter Sewell and Iulian Neamtiu},
TITLE = {\emph{Mutatis Mutandis}: Safe and Flexible Dynamic Software Updating (full version)},
VOLUME = 29,
NUMBER = 4,
JOURNAL = {{ACM} Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)},
NOTE = {Full version of POPL 05 paper},
YEAR = 2007,
MONTH = AUG
}