Safe and sound program analysis with Flix
Magnus Linnet Madsen, Ondřej Lhoták · 2018
Program development tools such as bug finders, build automation tools, compilers, debuggers, integrated development environments, and refactoring tools increasingly rely on static analysis techniques to reason about program behavior. Implementing such static analysis tools is a complex and difficult task with concerns about safety and soundness. Safety guarantees that the fixed point computation -- inherent in most static analyses -- converges and ultimately terminates with a deterministic result. Soundness guarantees that the computed result over-approximates the concrete behavior of the program under analysis. But how do we know if we can trust the result of the static analysis itself? Who will guard the guards?