A Precise Framework for Source-Level Control-Flow Analysis

Software corpora are crucial for evaluating research artifacts and ensuring repeatability of outcomes. Corpora such as DaCapo and Defects4J provide a collection of real-world opensource projects for evaluating the robustness and performance of software tools like static analysers. However, what do we know about these corpora? What do we know about their composition? Are they really suited for our particular problem? We developed JFEATURE, an extensible static analysis tool that extracts syntactic and semantic features from Java programs, to assist developers in answering these questions. We demonstrate the potential of JFEATURE by applying it to four widely-used corpora in the program analysis area, and we suggest other applications, including longitudinal studies of individual Java projects and the creation of new corpora.

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JavaDL: automatically incrementalizing Java bug pattern detection

Dura

Reichenbach

Söderberg

2021

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Static checker frameworks support software developers by automatically discovering bugs that fit general-purpose bug patterns. These frameworks ship with hundreds of detectors for such patterns and allow developers to add custom detectors for their own projects. However, existing frameworks generally encode detectors in imperative specifications, with extensive details of not only what to detect but also how . These details complicate detector maintenance and evolution, and also interfere with the framework’s ability to change how detection is done, for instance, to make the detectors incremental. In this paper, we present JavaDL, a Datalog-based declarative specification language for bug pattern detection in Java code. JavaDL seamlessly supports both exhaustive and incremental evaluation from the same detector specification. This specification allows developers to describe local detector components via syntactic pattern matching , and nonlocal (e.g., interprocedural) reasoning via Datalog-style logical rules . We compare our approach against the well-established SpotBugs and Error Prone tools by re-implementing several of their detectors in JavaDL. We find that our implementations are substantially smaller and similarly effective at detecting bugs on the Defects4J benchmark suite, and run with competitive runtime performance. In our experiments, neither incremental nor exhaustive analysis can consistently outperform the other, which highlights the value of our ability to transparently switch execution modes. We argue that our approach showcases the potential of clear-box static checker frameworks that constrain the bug detector specification language to enable the framework to adapt and enhance the detectors.

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A Precise Framework for Source-Level Control-Flow Analysis

Cited by 4 publications

References 42 publications

Leveraging Intermediate Languages: Current Applications

Leveraging Intermediate Languages: Current Applications

JFeature: Know Your Corpus

JavaDL: automatically incrementalizing Java bug pattern detection

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