Easing implementation and maintenance of academic static analyzers

Abstract

Academic research in static analysis produces software implementations. These implementations are time-consuming to develop and to maintain, in order to enable building further research upon the implementation. While necessary, these processes can be quickly time-consuming. This work documents the tools and techniques we have come up with to simplify the maintenance of Mopsa, the static analysis platform we have been developing since 2017. First, we describe an automated way to measure precision that does not require any manual inspection of the results, improves transparency of the analysis, and helps discovering regressions during continuous integration. Second, we have taken inspiration from standard tools observing the concrete execution of a program to design custom tools observing the abstract execution of the analyzed program itself, such as abstract debuggers and profilers. Finally, we report on some cases of automated testcase reduction.

Date
06/06/24
Location
Venice, Italy

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