Using ownership types to support library aliasing boundaries

This paper describes a library for concurrency used in a 10developer videogame project. The developers were inexperienced, yet there were no problems with data races in the multi-threaded application. We credit this to the explicit representation of ownership in the design of the library. Correct library usage implies aliasing boundaries which bear a strong resemblance to the ownersas-dominators property enforced by ownership types. We explore other situations where analogous aliasing boundaries exist and discuss a family of related libraries that could benefit from a design explicitly representing ownership. The ownership relations in the library currently have no support from the type system. We examine approaches to embed static checking of the aliasing boundaries in our implementation language, C++.