Software Product Line Analysis Using Variability-aware Datalog

Abstract

Applying program analyses to Software Product Lines (SPLs) has been a fundamental research problem at the intersection<br>of Product Line Engineering and software analysis. Different attempts have been made to "lift" particular product-level analyses to run on the entire product line. In this paper, we tackle the class of Datalog-based analyses (e.g., pointer and taint analyses), study the theoretical aspects of lifting Datalog inference, and implement a lifted inference algorithm inside the Souffl Datalog engine. We evaluate our implementation on a set of Java and C-language benchmark product lines. We show significant savings in processing time and fact database size (billions of times faster on one of the benchmarks) compared to brute-force analysis of each product individually.

Applying declarative analysis to industrial automotive software product line models

“…In previous work, we lifted a whole class of analyses as opposed to a single analysis. Specifically, we designed and implemented a variability-aware Datalog engine (Shahin and Chechik, 2020b) that can be used to efficiently apply an existing single-product Datalog analysis to a fact-based model of a whole product line (Shahin et al, 2019); and we used the engine to apply lifted pointer and taint analyses to Java product lines (Shahin et al, 2019) and other lifted analyses to C-language product lines (Shahin et al, 2021a). Our approach applies to annotative SPLs, in which each element in an SPL artifact is annotated with the features to which it belongs.…”

Applying Declarative Analysis to Software Product Line Models: An Industrial Study

“…In previous work, we lifted a whole class of analyses as opposed to a single analysis. Specifically, we designed and implemented a variability-aware Datalog engine [14] that can be used to efficiently apply an existing single-product Datalog analysis to facts extracted from a whole product line [1], and we used the engine to apply a lifted pointer and taint analyses to Java product lines [1] and other lifted analyses to C-language product lines [15]. Our approach applies to annotative SPLs, in which each element in an SPL artifact is annotated with the features it belongs to.…”