Integrated program debugging, verification, and optimization using abstract interpretation (and the Ciao system preprocessor)

Abstract

The technique of Abstract Interpretation has allowed the development of very sophisticated global program analyses which are at the same time provably correct and practical. We present in a tutorial fashion a novel program development framework which uses abstract interpretation as a fundamental tool. The framework uses modular, incremental abstract interpretation to obtain information about the program. This information is used to validate programs, to detect bugs with respect to partial specifications written using assertions (in the program itself and/or in system libraries), to generate and simplify run-time tests, and to perform high-level program transformations such as multiple abstract specialization, parallelization, and resource usage control, all in a provably correct way. In the case of validation and debugging, the assertions can refer to a variety of program points such as procedure entry, procedure exit, points within procedures, or global computations. The system can reason with much richer information than, for example, traditional types. This includes data structure shape (including pointer sharing), bounds on data structure sizes, and other operational variable instantiation properties, as well as procedure-level properties such as determinacy, termination, nonfailure, and bounds on resource consumption (time or space cost). CiaoPP, the preprocessor of the Ciao multi-paradigm programming system, which implements the described functionality, will be used to illustrate the fundamental ideas.

Symbolic Evaluation Graphs and Term Rewriting — A General Methodology for Analyzing Logic Programs

“…In contrast, our approach is applicable to a much wider class of logic programs (including non-well-moded and non-definite programs). 12 To compare their power, we evaluated AProVE against the Complexity Analysis System for LOGic (CASLOG) [11] and the Ciao Preprocessor (CiaoPP) [18,19], which implements the approach of [29]. We ran the three tools on all 477 Prolog programs from the TPDB, again using 2.2 GHz Quad-Opteron 848 Linux machines with a timeout of 60 seconds per program.…”

Turbo DiSL: Partial Evaluation for High-Level Bytecode Instrumentation

“…For example, Albert et al use partial evaluation to automatically generate specialized programs by transforming Java bytecode into Prolog to apply powerful constraint logic programming [1]. The Prolog code is then interpreted by the CiaoPP abstract interpreter [5]. While this approach allows for powerful interpretative partial evaluation, it only handles a subset of Java that lacks exception handling, multi-threading, and reflection.…”

Annotation Algorithms for Unrestricted Independent And-Parallelism in Logic Programs

“…UUDG annotation algorithm input to the proposed annotators. Alternatively, this information can be stated by the programmer via assertions [13].…”