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We consider the problem of making expressive, interactive static analyzerscompositional. Such a technique could help bring the power of server-based static analyses to integrated development environments (IDEs), updating their results live as the code is modified. Compositionality is key for this scenario, as it enables reuse of already-computed analysis results for unmodified code. Previous techniques for interactive static analysis either lack compositionality, cannot express arbitrary abstract domains, or are not from-scratch consistent. We present demanded summarization, the first algorithm for incremental compositional analysis in arbitrary abstract domains that guarantees from-scratch consistency. Our approach analyzes individual procedures using a recent technique for demanded analysis, computing summaries on demand for procedure calls. A dynamically updated summary dependency graph enables precise result invalidation after program edits, and the algorithm is carefully designed to guarantee from-scratch-consistent results after edits, even in the presence of recursion and in arbitrary abstract domains. We formalize our technique and prove soundness, termination, and from-scratch consistency. An experimental evaluation of a prototype implementation on synthetic and real-world program edits provides evidence for the feasibility of this theoretical framework, showing potential for major performance benefits over non-demanded compositional analyses.more » « less
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A resource leak occurs when a program fails to free some finite resource after it is no longer needed. Such leaks are a significant cause of real-world crashes and performance problems. Recent work proposed an approach to prevent resource leaks based on checking resource management specifications. A resource management specification expresses how the program allocates resources, passes them around, and releases them; it also tracks the ownership relationship between objects and resources, and aliasing relationships between objects. While this specify-and-verify approach has several advantages compared to prior techniques, the need to manually write annotations presents a significant barrier to its practical adoption. This paper presents a novel technique to automatically infer a resource management specification for a program, broadening the applicability of specify-and-check verification for resource leaks. Inference in this domain is challenging because resource management specifications differ significantly in nature from the types that most inference techniques target. Further, for practical effectiveness, we desire a technique that can infer the resource management specification intended by the developer, even in cases when the code does not fully adhere to that specification. We address these challenges through a set of inference rules carefully designed to capture real-world coding patterns, yielding an effective fixed-point-based inference algorithm. We have implemented our inference algorithm in two different systems, targeting programs written in Java and C#. In an experimental evaluation, our technique inferred 85.5% of the annotations that programmers had written manually for the benchmarks. Further, the verifier issued nearly the same rate of false alarms with the manually-written and automatically-inferred annotations.more » « less
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We consider the problem of making expressive static analyzers interactive. Formal static analysis is seeing increasingly widespread adoption as a tool for verification and bug-finding, but even with powerful cloud infrastructure it can take minutes or hours to get batch analysis results after a code change. While existing techniques offer some demand-driven or incremental aspects for certain classes of analysis, the fundamental challenge we tackle is doing both for arbitrary abstract interpreters. Our technique, demanded abstract interpretation, lifts program syntax and analysis state to a dynamically evolving graph structure, in which program edits, client-issued queries, and evaluation of abstract semantics are all treated uniformly. The key difficulty addressed by our approach is the application of general incremental computation techniques to the complex, cyclic dependency structure induced by abstract interpretation of loops with widening operators. We prove that desirable abstract interpretation meta-properties, including soundness and termination, are preserved in our approach, and that demanded analysis results are equal to those computed by a batch abstract interpretation. Experimental results suggest promise for a prototype demanded abstract interpretation framework: by combining incremental and demand-driven techniques, our framework consistently delivers analysis results at interactive speeds, answering 95% of queries within 1.2 seconds.more » « less
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