Johannes Kloos

• Asynchronous concurrency is a wide-spread way of writing programs that deal with many short tasks. It is the programming model behind event-driven concurrency, as exemplified by GUI applications, where the tasks correspond to event handlers, web applications based around JavaScript, the implementation of web browsers, but also of server-side software or operating systems. This model is widely used because it provides the performance benefits of concurrency together with easier programming than multi-threading. While there is ample work on how to implement asynchronous programs, and significant work on testing and model checking, little research has been done on handling asynchronous programs that involve heap manipulation, nor on how to automatically optimize code for asynchronous concurrency. This thesis addresses the question of how we can reason about asynchronous programs while considering the heap, and how to use this this to optimize programs. The work is organized along the main questions: (i) How can we reason about asynchronous programs, without ignoring the heap? (ii) How can we use such reasoning techniques to optimize programs involving asynchronous behavior? (iii) How can we transfer these reasoning and optimization techniques to other settings? The unifying idea behind all the results in the thesis is the use of an appropriate model encompassing global state and a promise-based model of asynchronous concurrency. For the first question, We start from refinement type systems for sequential programs and extend them to perform precise resource-based reasoning in terms of heap contents, known outstanding tasks and promises. This extended type system is known as Asynchronous Liquid Separation Types, or ALST for short. We implement ALST in for OCaml programs using the Lwt library. For the second question, we consider a family of possible program optimizations, described by a set of rewriting rules, the DWFM rules. The rewriting rules are type-driven: We only guarantee soundness for programs that are well-typed under ALST. We give a soundness proof based on a semantic interpretation of ALST that allows us to show behavior inclusion of pairs of programs. For the third question, we address an optimization problem from industrial practice: Normally, JavaScript files that are referenced in an HTML file are be loaded synchronously, i.e., when a script tag is encountered, the browser must suspend parsing, then load and execute the script, and only after will it continue parsing HTML. But in practice, there are numerous JavaScript files for which asynchronous loading would be perfectly sound. First, we sketch a hypothetical optimization using the DWFM rules and a static analysis. To actually implement the analysis, we modify the approach to use a dynamic analysis. This analysis, known as JSDefer, enables us to analyze real-world web pages, and provide experimental evidence for the efficiency of this transformation.