Computing summaries of string loops in C for better testing and refactoring

Timotej Kapus, Oren Ish-Shalom, Shachar Itzhaky, Noam Rinetzky, Cristian Cadar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Analysing and comprehending C programs that use strings is hard: using standard library functions for manipulating strings is not enforced and programs often use complex loops for the same purpose. We introduce the notion of memoryless loops that capture some of these string loops and present a counterexample-guided synthesis approach to summarise memoryless loops using C standard library functions, which has applications to testing, optimisation and refactoring. We prove our summarisation is correct for arbitrary input strings and evaluate it on a database of loops we gathered from thirteen open-source programs. Our approach can summarise over two thirds of memoryless loops in less than five minutes of computation time per loop. We then show that these summaries can be used to (1) improve symbolic execution (2) optimise native code, and (3) refactor code.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPLDI 2019 - Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
EditorsKathryn S. McKinley, Kathleen Fisher
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages874-888
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9781450367127
DOIs
StatePublished - 8 Jun 2019
Event40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2019 - Phoenix, United States
Duration: 22 Jun 201926 Jun 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI)

Conference

Conference40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, PLDI 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhoenix
Period22/06/1926/06/19

Funding

FundersFunder number
Blavatnik Family Foundation1996/18
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilEP/N007166/1

    Keywords

    • Loop Summarisation
    • Optimisation
    • Refactoring
    • Strings
    • Symbolic Execution
    • Synthesis

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