pymwp: A Static Analyzer Determining Polynomial Growth Bounds

Abstract

We present pymwp, a static analyzer that automatically computes, if they exist, polynomial bounds relating input and output sizes. In case of exponential growth, our tool detects precisely which dependencies between variables induced it. Based on the sound mwp-flow calculus, the analysis captures bounds on large classes of programs by being non-deterministic and not requiring termination. For this reason, implementing this calculus required solving several non-trivial implementation problems, to handle its complexity and non-determinism, but also to provide meaningful feedback to the programmer. The duality of the analysis result and compositionality of the calculus make our approach original in the landscape of complexity analyzers. We conclude by demonstrating experimentally how pymwp is a practical and performant static analyzer to automatically evaluate variable growth bounds of C programs.