CallE: An Effect System for Method Calls

Effect systems are used to statically reason about the effects an expression may have when evaluated. In the literature, such effects include various behaviours as diverse as memory accesses and exception throwing. Here we present CallE, an object-oriented language that takes a flexible approach where effects are just method calls: this works well because ordinary methods often model things like I/O operations, access to global state, or primitive language operations such as thread creation. CallE supports both flexible and fine-grained control over such behaviour, in a way designed to minimise the complexity of annotations. CallE's effect system can be used to prevent OO code from performing privileged operations, such as querying a database, modifying GUI widgets, exiting the program, or performing network communication. It can also be used to ensure determinism, by preventing methods from (indirectly) calling non-deterministic primitives like random number generation or file reading

API Usage Verification Through Dataflow Analysis

Using APIs in a program is often difficult because of the incomplete documentation and the shortage of available examples. To cope with that, we have seen the increase of API checking tools that provide efficient suggestions for API usage. However, most of those checking tools use a pattern-based analysis to determine errors such as misuse of API calls. In this thesis, we introduce a different analysis technique that relies on explicit API state transitions for the analysis of the program. We adopt a static dataflow analysis framework from SOOT to inspect state transitions at each program point

Effect-driven QuickChecking of compilers

How does one test a language implementation with QuickCheck (aka. property-based testing)? One approach is to generate programs following the grammar of the language. But in a statically-typed language such as OCaml too many of these candidate programs will be rejected as ill-typed by the type checker. As a refinement Pałka et al. propose to generate programs in a goal-directed, bottom-up reading up of the typing relation. We have written such a generator. However many of the generated programs has output that depend on the evaluation order, which is commonly under-specified in languages such as OCaml, Scheme, C, C++, etc. In this paper we develop a type and effect system for conservatively detecting evaluation-order dependence and propose its goal-directed reading as a generator of programs that are independent of evaluation order. We illustrate the approach by generating programs to test OCaml's two compiler backends against each other and report on a number of bugs we have found doing so.</jats:p

Verification by Reduction to Functional Programs

In this thesis, we explore techniques for the development and verification of programs in a high-level, expressive, and safe programming language. Our programs can express problems over unbounded domains and over recursive and mutable data structures. We present an implementation language flexible enough to build interesting and useful systems. We mostly maintain a core shared language for the specifications and the implementation, with only a few extensions specific to expressing the specifications. Extensions of the core shared language include imperative features with state and side effects, which help when implementing efficient systems. Our language is a subset of the Scala programming language. Once verified, programs can be compiled and executed using the existing Scala tools. We present algorithms for verifying programs written in this language. We take a layer-based approach, where we reduce, at each step, the program to an equivalent program in a simpler language. We first purify functions by transforming away mutations into explicit return types in the functions' signatures. This step rewrites all mutations of data structures into cloning operations. We then translate local state into a purely functional code, hence eliminating all traces of imperative programming. The final language is a functional subset of Scala, on which we apply verification. We integrate our pipeline of translations into Leon, a verifier for Scala. We verify the core functional language by using an algorithm already developed inside Leon. The program is encoded into equivalent first-order logic formulas over a combination of theories and recursive functions. The formulas are eventually discharged to an external SMT solver. We extend this core language and the solving algorithm with support for both infinite-precision integers and bit-vectors. The algorithm takes into account the semantics gap between the two domains, and the programmer is ultimately responsible to use the proper type to represent the data. We build a reusable interface for SMT-LIB that enables us to swap solvers transparently in order to validate the formulas emitted by Leon. We experiment with writing solvers in Scala; they could offer both a better and safer integration with the rest of the system. We evaluate the cost of using a higher-order language to implement such solvers, traditionally written in C/C++. Finally, we experiment with the system by building fully working and verified applications. We rely on the intersection of many features including higher-order functions, mutable data structures, recursive functions, and nondeterministic environment dependencies, to build concise and verified applications