Lifting the Abstraction Level of Compiler Transformations

Production compilers implement optimizing transformation rules for built-in types. What justifies applying these optimizing rules is the axioms that hold for built-in types and the built-in operations supported by these types. Similar axioms also hold for user-defined types and the operations defined on them, and therefore justify a set of optimization rules that may apply to user-defined types. Production compilers, however, do not attempt to construct and apply these optimization rules to user-defined types. Built-in types together the axioms that apply to them are instances of more general algebraic structures. So are user-defined types and their associated axioms. We use the technique of generic programming, a programming paradigm to design efficient, reusable software libraries, to identify the commonality of classes of types, whether built-in or user-defined, convey the semantics of the classes of types to compilers, design scalable and effective program analysis for them, and eventually apply optimizing rules to the operations on them. In generic programming, algorithms and data structures are defined in terms of such algebraic structures. The same definitions are reused for many types, both built-in and user-defined. This dissertation applies generic programming to compiler analyses and transformations. Analyses and transformations are specified for general algebraic structures, and they apply to all types, both built-in and primitive types

Optimizing pointer linked data structures

The thesis explores different ways of optimizing pointer linked data structures, and especially restructuring them. The mechanisms are based on compiler technology, theory, computer languages and hardware architecture that are capable of optimizing the memory layout of complex pointer linked data structures.Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

Featherweight VeriFast

VeriFast is a leading research prototype tool for the sound modular verification of safety and correctness properties of single-threaded and multithreaded C and Java programs. It has been used as a vehicle for exploration and validation of novel program verification techniques and for industrial case studies; it has served well at a number of program verification competitions; and it has been used for teaching by multiple teachers independent of the authors. However, until now, while VeriFast's operation has been described informally in a number of publications, and specific verification techniques have been formalized, a clear and precise exposition of how VeriFast works has not yet appeared. In this article we present for the first time a formal definition and soundness proof of a core subset of the VeriFast program verification approach. The exposition aims to be both accessible and rigorous: the text is based on lecture notes for a graduate course on program verification, and it is backed by an executable machine-readable definition and machine-checked soundness proof in Coq

Proceedings of the RESOLVE Workshop 2002

Proceedings of the RESOLVE Workshop 200