Aliasing models for object migration

In Obliq, a lexically scoped, distributed, object-oriented pro- gramming language, object migration was suggested as the creation of a copy of an object’s state at the target site, followed by turning the object itself into an alias, also called surrogate, for the remote copy. We consider the creation of object surrogates as an abstraction of the above- mentioned style of migration. We introduce Øjeblik, a distribution-free subset of Obliq, and provide three different configuration-style semantics, which only differ in the respective aliasing model. We show that two of the semantics, one of which matches Obliq’s implementation, render migration unsafe, while our new proposal for a third semantics is provably safe. Our work suggests a straightforward repair of Obliq’s aliasing model such that it allows programs to safely migrate objects.