Refinement-Based Program Analysis Tools

Refinement-Based Program Analysis Tools by Manu Sridharan Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Rastislav Bodík, Chair Program analysis tools are starting to change how software is developed. Verifiers can now eliminate certain complex bugs in large code bases, and automatic refactoring tools can greatly simplify code cleanup. Nevertheless, writing robust large-scale software remains a challenge, as greater use of component frameworks complicates debugging and program understanding. Developers need more powerful programming tools to combat this complexity and produce reliable code. This dissertation presents two techniques for more powerful debugging and program understanding tools based on refinement. In general, refinement-based techniques aim to discover interesting properties of a large program by only reasoning about the most important parts of the program (typically a small amount of code) precisely, abstracting away the behavior of much of the program. Our key contribution is the first framework for effective refinement-based handling of object-oriented data structures; pervasive use of such data structures thwarts the effectiveness of most existing analyses and tools. Our two refinement-based techniques significantly advance the state-of-the-art in program analyses and tools for object-oriented languages. The first technique is a refinement-based points-to analysis that can compute precise answers in interactive