C++Now 2021

Our understanding of a program is formed locally: we design or examine a single neighborhood of a program at a time. The neighborhoods we consider most often are those of functions and objects, in the context of the interfaces that surround them, but independently of the implementations beyond those interfaces.

But these neighborhoods are not fully independent. Objects and functions form ongoing relationships with each other, each fulfilling their own obligations by relying on the obligations of others.

The field of jurisprudence provides us with terms for these relationships: right and duty; immunity and disability. Casting these inter-neighborhood relationships in these terms provides insight into the fundamentals of programming and can help us avoid problems involving as resource lifetime, aliasing, and race conditions.

While this presentation is intended to stand on its own, it continues the examination of procedural logic in my earlier talks, such as “The Truth of a Procedure” and “Neighborhoods Banding Together.” It improves upon the material in my 2017 talk, “Locally Atomic Capabilities and How to Count Them.”