Unisex: A unix‐based symbolic executor for pascal

Kemmerer, Richard A.; Eckmann, Steven T.

doi:10.1002/spe.4380150504

Cited by 47 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 12 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Later work applied similar techniques to Pascal [18], C [26], Fortran [13], and Ada [10], and Zhang explored symbolic execution in the context of pointers and structured data [33]. Use of symbolic execution to generate unit tests fully automatically goes back at least as far as Korel's 1996 paper [22], and has been applied to object-oriented unit tests in the Symstra system [31].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 98%

Variably interprocedural program analysis for runtime error detection

Tomb

Brat

Visser³

2007

Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper describes an analysis approach based on a combination of static and dynamic techniques to find run-time errors in Java code. It uses symbolic execution to find constraints under which an error (e.g., a null pointer dereference, array out of bounds access, or assertion violation) may occur and then solves these constraints to find test inputs that may expose the error. It only alerts the user to the possibility of a real error when it detects the expected exception during a program run.The analysis is customizable in two important ways. First, we can adjust how deeply to follow calls from each top-level method. Second, we can adjust the path termination condition for the symbolic execution engine to be either a bound on the path condition length or a bound on the number of times each instruction can be revisited.We evaluated the tool on a set of benchmarks from the literature as well as a number of real-world systems that range in size from a few thousand to 50,000 lines of code. The tool discovered all known errors in the benchmarks (as well as some not previously known) and reported on average 8 errors per 1000 lines of code for the industrial examples. In both cases the interprocedural call depth played little role in the error detection. That is, an intraprocedural analysis seems adequate for the class of errors we detect.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 98%

Variably interprocedural program analysis for runtime error detection

Tomb

Brat

Visser³

2007

Proceedings of the 2007 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The compiler uses symbolic execution [Kemmerer and Eckmann 1985] to extract expressions that denote the new values of instance variables and the multiset of invoked operations. Symbolic execution simply executes the methods, computing with expressions instead of values.…”

Section: Commutativity Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Eliminating synchronization overhead in automatically parallelized programs using dynamic feedback

Diniz

Rinard

1999

ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article presents dynamic feedback, a technique that enables computations to adapt dynamically to different execution environments. A compiler that uses dynamic feedback produces several different versions of the same source code; each version uses a different optimization policy. The generated code alternately performs sampling phases and production phases. Each sampling phase measures the overhead of each version in the current environment. Each production phase uses the version with the least overhead in the previous sampling phase. The computation periodically resamples to adjust dynamically to changes in the environment.We have implemented dynamic feedback in the context of a parallelizing compiler for object-based programs. The generated code uses dynamic feedback to automatically choose the best synchronization optimization policy. Our experimental results show that the synchronization optimization policy has a significant impact on the overall performance of the computation, that the best policy varies from program to program, that the compiler is unable to statically choose the best policy, and that dynamic feedback enables the generated code to exhibit performance that is comparable to that of code that has been manually tuned to use the best policy. We have also performed a theoretical analysis which provides, under certain assumptions, a guaranteed optimality bound for dynamic feedback relative to a hypothetical (and unrealizable) optimal algorithm that uses the best policy at every point during the execution.

show abstract

“…English documentation of the bubble sort algorithm. The automatic generation of specifications similar to those shown in Figures 3 and 4 is a well-known problem for the current specifiers and provers (AbdEl-Hafiz, 1990;Kemmerer and Eckmann, 1985;Good, 1985). These systems require the user to provide the loop annotations, an ingenious task that requires expert knowledge.…”

Section: Alternatives For a Documentation Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The algorithmic approaches, on the other hand, usually annotate programs according to the formal semantics of a specific model of correctness (AbdEl-Hafiz, 1990;Kemmerer and Eckmann, 1985). By utilizing user-provided loop annotations, they offer mechanical assistance in proving the correctness of these annotations and in producing the specifications of a complete program.…”

Section: Alternatives For a Documentation Techniquementioning

confidence: 99%