A theory for control-flow graph exploration

Abstract. Detection of infeasible code has recently been identified as a scalable and automated technique to locate likely defects in software programs. Given the (acyclic) control-flow graph of a procedure, infea-sible code detection depends on an exhaustive search for feasible paths through the graph. A number of encodings of control-flow graphs into logic (understood by theorem provers) have been proposed in the past for this application. In this paper, we compare the performance of these different encodings in terms of runtime and the number of queries pro-cessed by the prover. We present a theory of acyclic control-flow as an alternative method of handling control-flow graphs. Such a theory can be built into theorem provers by means of theory plug-ins. Our experiments show that such native handling of control-flow can lead to significant performance gains, compared to previous encodings.