Abstract
We propose a method that transforms a C program manipulating containers using low-level pointer statements into an equivalent program where the containers are manipulated via calls of standard high-level container operations like push_back or pop_front. The input of our method is a C program annotated by a special form of shape invariants which can be obtained from current automatic shape analysers after a slight modification. The resulting program where the low-level pointer statements are summarized into high-level container operations is more understandable and (among other possible benefits) better suitable for program analysis. We have implemented our approach and successfully tested it through a number of experiments with list-based containers, including experiments with simplification of program analysis by separating shape analysis from analysing data-related properties.
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Notes
- 1.
Hence, e.g., an implementation of a procedure inserting an element into a sorted list, which includes the search for the element, will not be understood as a single destructive container operation, but rather as a procedure that calls a container iterator in a loop until the right place for the inserted element is found, and then calls a destructive container operation that inserts the given region at a position passed to it as a parameter.
- 2.
In practice, there would typically be many more such statements, seemingly increasing the size of the case studies, but such statements are not an issue for our method.
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This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation project 14-11384S.
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Dudka, K., Holík, L., Peringer, P., Trtík, M., Vojnar, T. (2016). From Low-Level Pointers to High-Level Containers. In: Jobstmann, B., Leino, K. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9583. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49122-5_21
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