Interactive, Scalable, Declarative Program Analysis: From Prototype to Implementation 9th International ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP 2007)
Abstract: Static analyses provide the semantic foundation for tools ranging from optimizing compilers to refactoring browsers and advanced debuggers. Unfortunately, developing new analysis specifications and implementations is often difficult and error prone. Since analysis specifications are generally written in a declarative style, logic programming presents an attractive model for producing executable specifications of analyses. However, prior work on using logic programming for program analysis has focused exclusively on solving constraints derived from program texts by an external preprocessor. In this paper, we present DIMPLE, an analysis framework for Java bytecodes implemented in the Yap Prolog system [8]. DIMPLE provides both a representation of Java bytecodes in a database of relations and a declarative domain-specific language for specifying new analyses as queries over this database. DIMPLE thus enables researchers to use logic programming for every step of the analysis development process, from specification to prototype to implementation. We demonstrate that our approach facilitates rapid prototyping of new program analyses and produces executable analysis implementations that are speed-competitive with specialized analysis toolkits.
Authors: William Benton and Charles Fischer