The Fearless Journey [Draft]

TL;DR

The paper introduces the 'Fearless Heart', an extension of Featherweight Java that supports complex real-world programming features like mutability and side effects, while maintaining minimality and reasoning advantages.

Contribution

It presents a new object calculus, 'Fearless Heart', that enhances minimal OO models with real-world features, and extends it with Reference Capabilities to support mutability and parallelism.

Findings

R-Fearless supports mutability and side effects.

It retains reasoning advantages of functional programming.

It is suitable for practical systems and formal models.

Abstract

Existing minimal Object-Oriented models (OO), like Featherweight Java (FJ), are valuable for modelling programs and designing new programming languages and tools. However, their utility in developing real-world programs is limited. We introduce the 'Fearless Heart', a novel object calculus preserving FJ's minimal and extensible nature while being more suited for constructing complex, real-world applications. To illustrate the extensibility of the Fearless Heart, we extend it with Reference Capabilities (RC), creating R-Fearless. It supports mutability and other side effects while retaining the reasoning advantages of functional programming and gaining support for features that are well-known to be enabled by RC, like automatic parallelism, caching and invariants. R-Fearless is still minimal enough to allow further extensions. It is an ideal foundation for constructing both practical systems and formal models.