Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

For a while now I have  been engaged in  a core problem of software verification: the aliasing problem. As with many difficult problems in science, it is easy to state the basic question: can we determine automatically whether at a program point p the values of two reference expressions e and f can ever denote the same object?

Alias analysis lies at the core of many problems in software analysis and verification.

Earlier work [2] I introduced an “alias calculus”. The calculus is a set of rules, attached to the constructs of the programming language, to compute the “alias relation”: the set of possibly aliased expression pairs. A new paper [1] with Sergey Velder and Alexander Kogtenkov improves the model (correcting in particular an error in the axiom for assignment, whose new version has been proved sound using Coq) and applies it to the inference of frame properties. Here the abstract:

Alias analysis, which determines whether two expressions in a program may reference to the same object, has many potential applications in program construction and verification. We have developed a theory for alias analysis, the “alias calculus”, implemented its application to an object-oriented language, and integrated the result into a modern IDE. The calculus has a higher level of precision than many existing alias analysis techniques. One of the principal applications is to allow automatic change analysis, which leads to inferring “modifies clauses”, providing a significant advance towards addressing the Frame Problem. Experiments were able to infer the “modifies” clauses of an existing formally specied library. Other applications, in particular to concurrent programming, also appear possible. The article presents the calculus, the application to frame inference including experimental results, and other projected applications. The ongoing work includes building more efficient model capturing aliasing properties and soundness proof for its essential elements.

This is not the end of the work, as better models and implementations are needed, but an important step.

References

[1] Sergey Velder, Alexander Kogtenkovand Bertrand Meyer: Alias Calculus, Frame Calculus and Frame Inference, in Science of Computer Programming, to appear in 2014 (appeared online 26 November 2013); draft available here, published version here.
[2] Bertrand Meyer: Steps Towards a Theory and Calculus of Aliasing, in International Journal of Software and Informatics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2011, pages 77-116, available here.

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