Static Analysis for Safe Destructive Updates in a Functional Language

Extending Coq with Imperative Features and Its Application to SAT Verification

“…Some kind of destructive arrays are available in provers like ACL2 [4], Isabelle/HOL [5] or PVS [14], but some of these techniques are difficult to apply directly to a prover with a rich logic such as Coq and anyway all of them would require a major modification in the architecture of the prover. To our knowledge, the idea of using persistent arrays inside a prover is new.…”

“…Unfortunately, monads are quite difficult to manage in a prover without developing some infrastructure (see [5,15] for example). An alternative approach is to develop some kind of program analysis that is capable of discovering (automatically or semiautomatically) that it can safely use destructive arrays instead of functional ones (see [14] for example). If one wants this technique to be applicable to a large set of programs, such analysis is usually rather complex.…”

Reflections on Verifying Software with Whiley

“…Consider: [28,29,30]). Indeed, the underlying implementation does pass compound structures by reference and copies them only when absolutely necessary.…”

Copy-on-write in the PHP language

“…Indeed, copy-on-write techniques for functional arrays were already proposed for IFP (Robison 1987) and SETL (Schwartz 1975) in early days. More recently, after the dynamic reference counting becomes less popular as a memory management scheme, optimization techniques using the static approximation of reference counts are proposed (Hudak and Bloss 1985;Bloss 1989;Odersky 1991;Wadler 1990;Turner et al 1995;Hofmann 2000;Shankar 2001). Such work tries to determine when we can perform in-place update on functional data structures.…”