Systematic realisation of control flow analyses for CML

Abstract

We present a methodology for the systematic realisation of control flow analyses and illustrate it for Concurrent ML. We start with an abstract specijicution of the analysis that is next proved semantically sound with respect to a traditional small-step operational semantics; this result holds for terminating w well as non-terminating programs. The analysis is defined coinductively and it is shown that all programs have a least analysis result (that is indeed the best one). To realise the analysis we massage the specification in three stages: (i) to explicitly record reachability of subexpressions, (ii) to be defined in a syntax-directed manner, and (iii) to generate a set of constraints that subsequently can be solved by standard techniques. We prove equivalence results between the different versions of the analysis; in particular it follows that the least solution to the constraints generated will be the least analysis result also to the initial specification.

Static Analysis for the π-Calculus with Applications to Security

“…There is also a constructive procedure for obtaining the least solution which operates in O(N 5 ) time in the size of processes (see 18,31]). To describe it we shall concentrate on a process, P ?…”

Interprocedural Control Flow Analysis

“…Abstract Interpretation. In Abstract Interpretation [4], the systematic development of program analyses is likely to span a spectrum from abstract specifications (like [16] in the case of Control Flow Analysis), over syntax-directed specifications (as in the present paper), to actual implementations in the form of constraints being generated and subsequently solved (as in [8,9,18,19,6]). The main advantage of this approach is that semantic issues can be ignored in later stages once they have been dealt with in earlier stages.…”

Semantics, Logics, and Calculi

“…Our static analysis is specified in terms of Flow Logic [16,14], a declarative approach borrowing from and integrating many classical static techniques. Flow Logic has been applied to a wide variety of programming languages and calculi of computation including calculi with functional, imperative, object-oriented, concurrent, distributed, and mobile features, among many see [12,6,4,15,10].…”