Sound and reusable components for abstract interpretation

2019

Abstract interpretation is a methodology for defining sound static analysis. Yet, building sound static analyses for modern programming languages is difficult, because these static analyses need to combine sophisticated abstractions for values, environments, stores, etc. However, static analyses often tightly couple these abstractions in the implementation, which not only complicates the implementation, but also makes it hard to decide which parts of the analyses can be proven sound independently from each other. Furthermore, this coupling makes it hard to combine soundness lemmas for parts of the analysis to a soundness proof of the complete analysis. To solve this problem, we propose to c…