Welcome to Anton Risberg Alaküla's licentiate thesis seminar on Wednesday October 30th at 13:15-15:00 in E:1406

Thesis title: Property Probes: Live Exploration of Source Code Analysis

Author: Anton Risberg Alaküla, Department of Computer Science, Lund University

Faculty opponent: Professor Daniel Varro, Linköping University

Examiner: Docent Markus Borg, LTH

Supervisor: Professor Görel Hedin, LTH

Co-supervisors: Associate Senior Lecturer Niklas Fors, LTH & Associate Professor Adrian Pop, Linköping University

Date and time: Wednesday 30 October at 13:15

Location: E:1406, E-huset, LTH, Ole Römers väg 3, Lund

Link to download thesis: https://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/cs/Personal/Anton_Risberg_Alakula/licentiate_thesis_property_probes.pdf

Abstract

Source code analysis is ubiquitous in the development of software tools, for example in compilers to detect compile-time errors and possible optimizations, in IDEs to provide interactive coding assistance, and in stand-alone analysis tools to detect bugs. There are several techniques that have been developed to help the analysis developer, including one called Reference Attribute Grammars (RAGs). With RAGs, the developer specifies functionality for their analysis as a set of high level equations. The concern of how to apply the equations is abstracted away, and handled by a RAG evaluation system. This abstraction can enable more concise and efficient implementations, but also calls for adequate debugging tools. When things break down, being able to see how things execute in terms of these abstractions helps the developer identify and fix issues.

The aim of this thesis is to provide source code analysis developers with a live, exploratory view of the inner workings of their analyses. We are particularly interested in helping developers using the RAG formalism. In this thesis, we introduce the concept of property probes to support this goal. Property probes enable efficient and robust interaction with computation associated with nodes on abstract syntax trees (ASTs). The different kinds of probes, and associated algorithms for creating and applying them, are presented in this thesis. We also present benchmarks showing that performance scales well for real-world development tasks.

We have implemented property probes in a tool called CodeProber. CodeProber has been integrated into two university courses on compilers and program analysis, as an aid during lab assignments. We wanted to determine the use- and user experience of the students that used it, and to this end we performed a mixed-method user study with students from the program analysis course. The focus of the study is a set of in-person interviews, and the overall feedback from students has been very positive.