A Toolkit for Constructing Type- and Constraint-Based Program Analyses

. BANE (the Berkeley Analysis Engine) is a publicly available toolkit for constructing type- and constraint-based 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 components 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 well-founded analysis is necessary but not sufficient for obtaining a useful analysis. Demonstrating utility requires implementation and experimentation, preferably with large pr..