Summary: A Toolkit for Constructing Type­ and
Constraint­Based Program Analyses
Alexander Aiken, Manuel F¨ahndrich, Jeffrey S. Foster, Zhendong Su
University of California, Berkeley ? ??
Abstract. BANE (the Berkeley Analysis Engine) is a publicly available
toolkit for constructing type­ and constraint­based program analyses. 1
We describe the goals of the project, the rationale for BANE's overall
design, some examples coded in BANE, and briefly compare BANE with
other program analysis frameworks.
1 Introduction
Automatic program analysis is central to contemporary compilers and software
engineering tools. Program analyses are also arguably the most difficult compo­
nents of such systems to develop, as significant theoretical and practical issues
must be addressed in even relatively straightforward analyses.
Program analysis poses difficult semantic problems, and considerable effort
has been devoted to understanding what it means for an analysis to be correct
[CC77]. However, designing a theoretically well­founded analysis is necessary but
not sufficient for obtaining a useful analysis. Demonstrating utility requires im­
plementation and experimentation, preferably with large programs. Many plau­
sible analyses are not beneficial in practice, and others require substantial mod­

Source: Aiken, Alex - Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
Su, Zhendong - Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences