Mechanical verification of refactorings

Sultana, Nik; Thompson, Simon

doi:10.1145/1328408.1328417

Cited by 22 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…However, neither of them provides formally verified or executable definitions. There are some results [19] in defining provably correct refactorings for simple languages, some mechanised proofs even for real-world refactorings [6] are available, but none of these allow for defining custom transformations and provide automatic verification for those.…”

Section: Verified Refactoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trustworthy Refactoring via Decomposition and Schemes: A Complex Case Study

Horpácsi¹,

Kőszegi²

2017

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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Widely used complex code refactoring tools lack a solid reasoning about the correctness of the transformations they implement, whilst interest in proven correct refactoring is ever increasing as only formal verification can provide true confidence in applying tool-automated refactoring to industrialscale code. By using our strategic rewriting based refactoring specification language, we present the decomposition of a complex transformation into smaller steps that can be expressed as instances of refactoring schemes, then we demonstrate the semi-automatic formal verification of the components based on a theoretical understanding of the semantics of the programming language. The extensible and verifiable refactoring definitions can be executed in our interpreter built on top of a static analyser framework.

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Section: Verified Refactoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trustworthy Refactoring via Decomposition and Schemes: A Complex Case Study

Horpácsi¹,

Kőszegi²

2017

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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“…Also for Erlang, Li [12] defines an API for describing microrefactorings and a feature-rich language for composition, but formal verification is not addressed. There are some results [21] in defining provably correct refactorings for simple languages, but for real-world cases, the question is still open. Our work aims to take a significant step further, and offers not only refactoring-specific proofs, but a generic verification technique for custom-defined transformations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Trustworthy Refactoring in Erlang

Horpácsi¹,

Kőszegi²,

Thompson³

2016

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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Tool-assisted refactoring transformations must be trustworthy if programmers are to be confident in applying them on arbitrarily extensive and complex code in order to improve style or efficiency. We propose a simple, high-level but rigorous, notation for defining refactoring transformations in Erlang, and show that this notation provides an extensible, verifiable and executable specification language for refactoring. To demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we show how to define and verify a number of example refactorings in the system.

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“…For the pure subsets of languages at least, it is possible to test refactorings by randomly generating programs in the languages, refactoring them randomly, and then testing the results of old and new versions on randomly generated inputs. 4 The relative simplicity of the semantics of the languages makes implementation more straightforward, and also admits the possibility, in principle at least, of proving the implementations of refactorings correct, as discussed in Sultana & Thompson (2008). 5 Other advantages apply only to particular languages.…”

Section: What Is Distinctively Functional?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Refactoring tools for functional languages

Thompson¹,

Li²

2013

J. Funct. Prog.

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Refactoring is the process of changing the design of a program without changing what it does. Typical refactorings, such as function extraction and generalisation, are intended to make a program more amenable to extension, more comprehensible and so on. Refactorings differ from other sorts of program transformation in being applied to source code, rather than to a 'core' language within a compiler, and also in having an effect across a code base, rather than to a single function definition, say. Because of this, there is a need to give automated support to the process. This paper reflects on our experience of building tools to refactor functional programs written in Haskell (HaRe) and Erlang (Wrangler). We begin by discussing what refactoring means for functional programming languages, first in theory, and then in the context of a larger example. Next, we address system design and details of system implementation as well as contrasting the style of refactoring and tooling for Haskell and Erlang. Building both tools led to reflections about what particular refactorings mean, as well as requiring analyses of various kinds, and we discuss both of these. We also discuss various extensions to the core tools, including integrating the tools with test frameworks; facilities for detecting and eliminating code clones; and facilities to make the systems extensible by users. We then reflect on our work by drawing some general conclusions, some of which apply particularly to functional languages, while many others are of general value.

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Mechanical verification of refactorings

Abstract: viAcknowledgements vii Preliminaries 1

Cited by 22 publications

References 45 publications

Trustworthy Refactoring via Decomposition and Schemes: A Complex Case Study

Trustworthy Refactoring via Decomposition and Schemes: A Complex Case Study

Towards Trustworthy Refactoring in Erlang

Refactoring tools for functional languages

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