Fine-grained classification of side-effect free methods in real-world Java code and applications to software security
Arran Stewart, Rachel Cardell‐Oliver, Rowan Davies · Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference · 2016
Previous researchers have argued that method purity (absence of side-effects) in object-oriented languages allows code to be more easily reasoned about, with beneficial effects for software security. However, many different forms of purity have been proposed, which poses a challenge for verifying this idea empirically. Furthermore, previous purity analyses of code have provided only coarse-grained results. We propose a finer-grained classification of levels of method purity, and analyse a portion of real-world code to determine the prevalence of different levels.