113,447 research outputs found
A Practical Type Analysis for Verification of Modular Prolog Programs
Regular types are a powerful tool for computing very precise descriptive types for logic programs. However, in the context of real life, modular Prolog programs, the accurate results obtained by regular types often come at the price of efficiency. In this paper we propose a combination of techniques aimed at improving analysis efficiency in this context. As a first technique we allow optionally reducing the accuracy of inferred types by using only the types defined by the user or present in the libraries. We claim that, for the purpose of verifying type signatures given in the form of assertions the precision obtained using this approach is sufficient, and show that analysis times can be reduced significantly. Our second technique is aimed at dealing with situations where we would like to limit the amount of reanalysis performed, especially for library modules. Borrowing some ideas from polymorphic type systems, we show how to solve the problem by admitting parameters in type specifications. This allows us to compose new call patterns with some pre computed analysis info without losing any information. We argue that together these two techniques contribute to the practical and scalable analysis and verification of types in Prolog programs
Automatic Verification of Erlang-Style Concurrency
This paper presents an approach to verify safety properties of Erlang-style,
higher-order concurrent programs automatically. Inspired by Core Erlang, we
introduce Lambda-Actor, a prototypical functional language with
pattern-matching algebraic data types, augmented with process creation and
asynchronous message-passing primitives. We formalise an abstract model of
Lambda-Actor programs called Actor Communicating System (ACS) which has a
natural interpretation as a vector addition system, for which some verification
problems are decidable. We give a parametric abstract interpretation framework
for Lambda-Actor and use it to build a polytime computable, flow-based,
abstract semantics of Lambda-Actor programs, which we then use to bootstrap the
ACS construction, thus deriving a more accurate abstract model of the input
program. We have constructed Soter, a tool implementation of the verification
method, thereby obtaining the first fully-automatic, infinite-state model
checker for a core fragment of Erlang. We find that in practice our abstraction
technique is accurate enough to verify an interesting range of safety
properties. Though the ACS coverability problem is Expspace-complete, Soter can
analyse these verification problems surprisingly efficiently.Comment: 12 pages plus appendix, 4 figures, 1 table. The tool is available at
http://mjolnir.cs.ox.ac.uk/soter
MELT - a Translated Domain Specific Language Embedded in the GCC Compiler
The GCC free compiler is a very large software, compiling source in several
languages for many targets on various systems. It can be extended by plugins,
which may take advantage of its power to provide extra specific functionality
(warnings, optimizations, source refactoring or navigation) by processing
various GCC internal representations (Gimple, Tree, ...). Writing plugins in C
is a complex and time-consuming task, but customizing GCC by using an existing
scripting language inside is impractical. We describe MELT, a specific
Lisp-like DSL which fits well into existing GCC technology and offers
high-level features (functional, object or reflexive programming, pattern
matching). MELT is translated to C fitted for GCC internals and provides
various features to facilitate this. This work shows that even huge, legacy,
software can be a posteriori extended by specifically tailored and translated
high-level DSLs.Comment: In Proceedings DSL 2011, arXiv:1109.032
Reify Your Collection Queries for Modularity and Speed!
Modularity and efficiency are often contradicting requirements, such that
programers have to trade one for the other. We analyze this dilemma in the
context of programs operating on collections. Performance-critical code using
collections need often to be hand-optimized, leading to non-modular, brittle,
and redundant code. In principle, this dilemma could be avoided by automatic
collection-specific optimizations, such as fusion of collection traversals,
usage of indexing, or reordering of filters. Unfortunately, it is not obvious
how to encode such optimizations in terms of ordinary collection APIs, because
the program operating on the collections is not reified and hence cannot be
analyzed.
We propose SQuOpt, the Scala Query Optimizer--a deep embedding of the Scala
collections API that allows such analyses and optimizations to be defined and
executed within Scala, without relying on external tools or compiler
extensions. SQuOpt provides the same "look and feel" (syntax and static typing
guarantees) as the standard collections API. We evaluate SQuOpt by
re-implementing several code analyses of the Findbugs tool using SQuOpt, show
average speedups of 12x with a maximum of 12800x and hence demonstrate that
SQuOpt can reconcile modularity and efficiency in real-world applications.Comment: 20 page
Array operators using multiple dispatch: a design methodology for array implementations in dynamic languages
Arrays are such a rich and fundamental data type that they tend to be built
into a language, either in the compiler or in a large low-level library.
Defining this functionality at the user level instead provides greater
flexibility for application domains not envisioned by the language designer.
Only a few languages, such as C++ and Haskell, provide the necessary power to
define -dimensional arrays, but these systems rely on compile-time
abstraction, sacrificing some flexibility. In contrast, dynamic languages make
it straightforward for the user to define any behavior they might want, but at
the possible expense of performance.
As part of the Julia language project, we have developed an approach that
yields a novel trade-off between flexibility and compile-time analysis. The
core abstraction we use is multiple dispatch. We have come to believe that
while multiple dispatch has not been especially popular in most kinds of
programming, technical computing is its killer application. By expressing key
functions such as array indexing using multi-method signatures, a surprising
range of behaviors can be obtained, in a way that is both relatively easy to
write and amenable to compiler analysis. The compact factoring of concerns
provided by these methods makes it easier for user-defined types to behave
consistently with types in the standard library.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, workshop paper for the ARRAY '14 workshop, June
11, 2014, Edinburgh, United Kingdo
A Falsification View of Success Typing
Dynamic languages are praised for their flexibility and expressiveness, but
static analysis often yields many false positives and verification is
cumbersome for lack of structure. Hence, unit testing is the prevalent
incomplete method for validating programs in such languages.
Falsification is an alternative approach that uncovers definite errors in
programs. A falsifier computes a set of inputs that definitely crash a program.
Success typing is a type-based approach to document programs in dynamic
languages. We demonstrate that success typing is, in fact, an instance of
falsification by mapping success (input) types into suitable logic formulae.
Output types are represented by recursive types. We prove the correctness of
our mapping (which establishes that success typing is falsification) and we
report some experiences with a prototype implementation.Comment: extended versio
Feasible reactivity in a synchronous pi-calculus
Reactivity is an essential property of a synchronous program. Informally, it
guarantees that at each instant the program fed with an input will `react'
producing an output. In the present work, we consider a refined property that
we call ` feasible reactivity'. Beyond reactivity, this property guarantees
that at each instant both the size of the program and its reaction time are
bounded by a polynomial in the size of the parameters at the beginning of the
computation and the size of the largest input. We propose a method to annotate
programs and we develop related static analysis techniques that guarantee
feasible reactivity for programs expressed in the S-pi-calculus. The latter is
a synchronous version of the pi-calculus based on the SL synchronous
programming model
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