The Choice Construct in the Souffle Language
Abstract
Datalog has become a popular implementation language for solving large-scale, real-world problems, including bug finders, network analysis tools, and disassemblers. These applications express complex behaviour with hundreds of relations and rules that often require a non-deterministic choice for tuples in relations to express worklist algorithms. This work is an experience report that describes the implementation of a choice construct in the Datalog engine Souffle. With the choice construct, we can express worklist algorithms such as spanning trees in a few lines of code. We highlight the differences between rule-based choice as described in prior work, and relation-based choice introduced by this work. We show that a choice construct enables certain worklist algorithms to be computed up to 10kx faster than having no choice construct.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2108.11212,
title = {The Choice Construct in the Souffle Language},
author = {Xiaowen Hu and Joshua Karp and David Zhao and Abdul Zreika and Xi Wu and Bernhard Scholz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.11212},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
This is an extended technical report of work that will be published at APLAS'21