CAREER: Vertically Integrated Program Analysis for Embedded Software

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CAREER: Vertically Integrated Program Analysis for Embedded SoftwareIn recent years, a great deal of progress has been made towards toolsupport for developing embedded software. Tools solve a variety ofdifficult problems, for example by automating error-proneimplementation tasks, by eliminating redundant and inefficientconstructs, and by guaranteeing the absence of certain classes oferrors, such as race conditions or out-of-memory exceptions. ThisNSF CAREER research is about Vertically Integrated Program Analysis andTransformation (VIPAT), a new way to look at embedded software tools:as a collection of building blocks that can be connected together indifferent ways to support novel analyses and transformations. Theexisting tools become mechanisms that are controlled by a high-levelpolicy. VIPAT is based on two main ideas. First, the verticalintegration of tools that operate at various levels of abstraction,which permits high-level transformations to be precisely targeted atparts of a system whose low-level resource usage is worst. Second, aclean separation between mechanism and policy, enabling effectivereuse of existing tools in new situations. This research is a steptowards a world where meaningful static guarantees about programbehavior can be made, and where software can be automaticallyspecialized to meet platform- and application-specific requirementssuch as time and energy constraints. The high-level vision is"fearless reuse": developers should spend less time worrying aboutresource usage and potential failure modes of components that theyreuse.