Control-Flow Refinement by Partial Evaluation, and its Application to Termination and Cost Analysis
Abstract
Control-flow refinement refers to program transformations whose purpose is to make implicit control-flow explicit, and is used in the context of program analysis to increase precision. Several techniques have been suggested for different programming models, typically tailored to improving precision for a particular analysis. In this paper we explore the use of partial evaluation of Horn clauses as a general-purpose technique for control-flow refinement for integer transitions systems. These are control-flow graphs where edges are annotated with linear constraints describing transitions between corresponding nodes, and they are used in many program analysis tools. Using partial evaluation for control-flow refinement has the clear advantage over other approaches in that soundness follows from the general properties of partial evaluation; in particular, properties such as termination and complexity are preserved. We use a partial evaluation algorithm incorporating property-based abstraction, and show how the right choice of properties allows us to prove termination and to infer complexity of challenging programs that cannot be handled by state-of-the-art tools. We report on the integration of the technique in a termination analyzer, and its use as a preprocessing step for several cost analyzers. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.12345,
title = {Control-Flow Refinement by Partial Evaluation, and its Application to Termination and Cost Analysis},
author = {Jesús J. Doménech and John P. Gallagher and Samir Genaim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.12345},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Paper presented at the 35th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2019), Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA, 20-25 September 2019, 18 pages