Statically safe program generation with SafeGen

✍ Scribed by Shan Shan Huang; David Zook; Yannis Smaragdakis

• Book ID: 104091982
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 541 KB
• Volume: 76
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0167-6423
• DOI: 10.1016/j.scico.2008.09.007

✦ Synopsis

SafeGen is a meta-programming language for writing statically safe generators of Java programs. If a program generator written in SafeGen passes the checks of the SafeGen compiler, then the generator will only generate well-formed Java programs, for any generator input. In other words, statically checking the generator guarantees the correctness of any generated program, with respect to static checks commonly performed by a conventional compiler (including type safety, existence of a superclass, etc.). To achieve this guarantee, SafeGen supports only language primitives for reflection over an existing well-formed Java program, primitives for creating program fragments, and a restricted set of constructs for iteration, conditional actions, and name generation. SafeGen's static checking algorithm is a combination of traditional type checking for Java, and a series of calls to a theorem prover to check the validity of first-order logical sentences, constructed to represent well-formedness properties of the generated program under all inputs. The approach has worked quite well in our tests, providing proofs for correct generators or pointing out interesting bugs.