Section: New Results

Hierarchical Abstraction of Dynamic Structures

Participants : Pascal Sotin, Xavier Rival.

abstract domains, shape analysis, domain combination In [26] , we designed a hierarchical shape abstract domain for the abstraction of complex data structures found in embedded softwares.

We propose a hierarchical shape abstract domain, so as to infer structural invariants of dynamic structures such as lists living inside static structures, such as arrays. This programming pattern is often used in safety critical embedded software that need to “allocate” dynamic structures inside static regions due to dynamic memory allocation being forbidden in this context. Our abstract domain precisely describes such hierarchies of structures. It combines several instances of simple shape abstract domains, dedicated to the representation of elementary shape properties, and also embeds a numerical abstract domain. This modular construction greatly simplifies the design and the implementation of the abstract domain. We provide an implementation, and show the effectiveness of our approach on a problem taken from a real code.