Symbolic Automata for Representing Big Code

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Analysis of massive codebases ("big code") presents an opportunity for drawing insights about programming practice and enabling code reuse. One of the main challenges in analyzing big code is finding a representation that captures sufficient semantic information, can be constructed efficiently, and is amenable to meaningful comparison operations. We present a formal framework for representing code in large codebases. In our framework, the semantic descriptor for each code snippet is a partial temporal specification that captures the sequences of method invocations on an API. The main idea is to represent partial temporal specifications as symbolic automata-automata where transitions may be labeled by variables, and a variable can be substituted by a letter, a word, or a regular language. Using symbolic automata, we construct an abstract domain for static analysis of big code, capturing both the partialness of a specification and the precision of a specification. We show interesting relationships between lattice operations of this domain and common operators for manipulating partial temporal specifications, such as building a more informative specification by consolidating two partial specifications, and comparing partial temporal specifications.
Publisher
SPRINGER
Issue Date
2016-06
Language
English
Article Type
Article
Citation

ACTA INFORMATICA, v.53, no.4, pp.327 - 356

ISSN
0001-5903
DOI
10.1007/s00236-015-0234-1
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10203/225264
Appears in Collection
CS-Journal Papers(저널논문)
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