Verification of Program Transformations with Inductive Refinement Types

Ahmad Salim Al-Sibahi (1) , Thomas P Jensen (1, 2) , Aleksandar S Dimovski (3) , Andrzej Wąsowski (3)

1 UCPH - University of Copenhagen = Københavns Universitet
2 CELTIQUE - Software certification with semantic analysis
3 ITU - IT University of Copenhagen

High-level transformation languages like Rascal include expressive features for manipulating large abstract syntax trees: first-class traversals, expressive pattern matching, backtracking, and generalized iterators. We present the design and implementation of an abstract interpretation tool, Rabit, for verifying inductive type and shape properties for transformations written in such languages. We describe how to perform abstract interpretation based on operational semantics, specifically focusing on the challenges arising when analyzing the expressive traversals and pattern matching. Finally, we evaluate Rabit on a series of transformations (normalization, desugaring, refactoring, code generators, type inference, etc.) showing that we can effectively verify stated properties.

Mots clés: CCS Concepts: • Theory of computation → Program verification; Program analysis; Abstraction; Functional constructs; Program schemes; Operational semantics; Control primitives; • Software and its engineering → Translator writing systems and compiler generators; Semantics; Transformation languages; abstract interpretation; static analysis; transformation languages

Domaines: Logique en informatique [cs.LO]

Ahmad Salim Al-Sibahi, Thomas P Jensen, Aleksandar S Dimovski, Andrzej Wąsowski. Verification of Program Transformations with Inductive Refinement Types. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2021, 30 (1), pp.1-33. ⟨10.1145/3409805⟩. ⟨hal-03518825⟩