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The usual advantages put forward for including nullability declarations in the type systems of programming languages are that they improve program reliability or performance. But there is another, entirely different, reason for doing so. In…

Code cloning, the duplication of code fragments, is common in software development. While some reuse aids productivity, excessive cloning hurts maintainability and introduces bugs. Hence, automatic code clone detection is vital. Meanwhile,…

The Rust programming language is famous for its strong ownership regime: at each point, each value is either exclusively owned, exclusively borrowed through a mutable reference, or borrowed as read-only through one or more shared…

Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…

Concolic testing is a popular dynamic validation technique that can be used for both model checking and automatic test case generation. We have recently introduced concolic testing in the context of logic programming. In contrast to…

We need ways to improve the code quality. Programmers have different level of tenure and experience. Standard and programming languages change and we are forced to re-use legacy code with minimum revision. Programmers develop their habits…

It is well-known, and often a topic of heated debates, that programs in some programming languages are more concise than in others. This is a relevant factor when comparing or aggregating volume-impacted metrics on source code written in a…

This article examines two approaches to verification, one based on using a logic for expressing properties of a system, and one based on showing the system equivalent to a simpler system that obviously has whatever property is of interest.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in code generation, but they may generate erroneous programs. Reading a program takes ten times longer than writing it. Showing these erroneous programs to developers will waste…

Fault localization is a critical process that involves identifying specific program elements responsible for program failures. Manually pinpointing these elements, such as classes, methods, or statements, which are associated with a fault…

Machine learning models are widely used, but can also often be wrong. Users would benefit from a reliable indication of whether a given output from a given model should be trusted, so a rational decision can be made whether to use the…

Sometimes machine code turns out to be a better target for verification than source code. RISC machine code is especially advantaged with respect to source code in this regard because it has only two instructions that access memory. That…

Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…

LLMs are widely used for code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks where they are required to generate structured output. They either need to reason about code, generate code for a given specification, or reason using programs of…

Users of program analyses expect that results change predictably in response to changes in their programs, but many analyses fail to provide such robustness. This paper introduces a theoretical framework that provides a unified language to…

Vibe coding, the much-touted use of AI techniques for programming, faces two overwhelming obstacles: the difficulty of specifying goals ("prompt engineering" is a form of requirements engineering, one of the toughest disciplines of software…

Software produced for research, published and otherwise, suffers from a number of common problems that make it difficult or impossible to run outside the original institution, or even off the primary developer's computer. We present ten…

As AI-based code generation becomes widespread, researchers are investigating the calibration of code LLMs - ensuring their confidence scores faithfully represent the true likelihood of code correctness. To do so, we investigate…

Modern program verifiers use logic-based encodings of the verification problem that are discharged by a back end reasoning engine. However, instances of such encodings for large programs can quickly overwhelm these back end solvers. Hence,…

Proponents of software verification have argued that simpler code is easier to verify: that is, that verification tools issue fewer false positives and require less human intervention when analyzing simpler code. We empirically validate…