Design and Evaluation of Coconut: Typestates for C++
Arwa Hameed Alsubhi, Ornela Dardha, Simon J. Gay · Science of Computer Programming · 2025
This paper introduces Coconut, a C++ tool that uses templates for defining object behaviours and validates them with typestate checking. Coconut employs the GIMPLE intermediate representation (IR) from the GCC compiler’s middle-end phase for static checks, ensuring objects follow valid state transitions as defined in typestate templates. It supports features like branching, recursion, aliasing, inheritance, and typestate visualisation. We illustrate Coconut’s application in embedded systems, validating their behaviour pre-deployment. We present an experimental study, showing that Coconut improves performance and reduces code complexity wrt the original code, highlighting the benefits of typestate-based verification.