Green: reducing, reusing and recycling constraints in program analysis

  • Authors:

  • Willem Visser;Jaco Geldenhuys;Matthew B. Dwyer

  • Affiliations:

  • Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa;Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa;University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The analysis of constraints plays an important role in many aspects of software engineering, for example constraint satisfiability checking is central to symbolic execution. However, the norm is to recompute results in each analysis. We propose a different approach where every call to the solver is wrapped in a check to see if the result is not already available. While many tools use some form of results caching, the novelty of our approach is the persistence of results across runs, across programs being analyzed, across different analyses and even across physical location. Achieving such reuse requires that constraints be distilled into their essential parts and represented in a canonical form. In this paper, we describe the key ideas of our approach and its implementation, the Green solver interface, which reduces constraints to a simple form, allows for reuse of constraint solutions within an analysis run, and allows for recycling constraint solutions produced in one analysis run for use in other analysis runs. We describe how we integrated Green into two existing symbolic execution tools and demonstrate the reuse we achieve in the different settings.