On the implementation of abstract interpretation systems for constraint logic programs

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1994. We report on an experiment with two tools for global analysis of logic programs. Both systems implement a top-down framework for abstract interpretation. PLAI (Programming in Logic with Abstract Interpretation) developed by Hermenegildo and Muthukumar is written in Prolog. GAIA (Generic Abstract Interpretation Algorithm) developed by Le Charlier and Van Hentenryck is written in C. With each system we have developed two applications. As abstractions we used a domain mode for logic programming and a domain freeness for constraint logic programming over numerical and unification constraints. Our results allow implementors to make a more knowledgeable choice between both systems and identify a number of practical issues (e.g. normalisation and optimisations) that arise in implementing abstract interpretation systems. The comparison of the results for modes and freeness illustrates the impact of the complexity of abstractions on the performance of the analysis. Moreover, as our experiments use state of the art technology, they give an idea of the feasibility of realising practical abstract interpretation tools based on these and similar abstractions. To our knowledge, this is the first paper that reports on coupling the same abstract domain with abstract interpretation algorithms that use C (GAIA) and Prolog (PLAI).status: publishe