Fully automatic worst-case complexity analysis has a number of applications
in computer-assisted program manipulation. A classical and powerful approach to
complexity analysis consists in formally deriving, from the program syntax, a
set of constraints expressing bounds on the resources required by the program,
which are then solved, possibly applying safe approximations. In several
interesting cases, these constraints take the form of recurrence relations.
While techniques for solving recurrences are known and implemented in several
computer algebra systems, these do not completely fulfill the needs of fully
automatic complexity analysis: they only deal with a somewhat restricted class
of recurrence relations, or sometimes require user intervention, or they are
restricted to the computation of exact solutions that are often so complex to
be unmanageable, and thus useless in practice. In this paper we briefly
describe PURRS, a system and software library aimed at providing all the
computer algebra services needed by applications performing or exploiting the
results of worst-case complexity analyses. The capabilities of the system are
illustrated by means of examples derived from the analysis of programs written
in a domain-specific functional programming language for real-time embedded
systems.Comment: 6 page