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International Workshop on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation

VMCAI 2011: Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation pp 248–262Cite as

An Evaluation of Automata Algorithms for String Analysis

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6538))

Abstract

There has been significant recent interest in automated reasoning techniques, in particular constraint solvers, for string variables. These techniques support a wide variety of clients, ranging from static analysis to automated testing. The majority of string constraint solvers rely on finite automata to support regular expression constraints. For these approaches, performance depends critically on fast automata operations such as intersection, complementation, and determinization. Existing work in this area has not yet provided conclusive results as to which core algorithms and data structures work best in practice.

In this paper, we study a comprehensive set of algorithms and data structures for performing fast automata operations. Our goal is to provide an apples-to-apples comparison between techniques that are used in current tools. To achieve this, we re-implemented a number of existing techniques. We use an established set of regular expressions benchmarks as an indicative workload. We also include several techniques that, to the best of our knowledge, have not yet been used for string constraint solving. Our results show that there is a substantial performance difference across techniques, which has implications for future tool design.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Virginia, USA

    Pieter Hooimeijer

  2. Microsoft Research, USA

    Margus Veanes

Authors
  1. Pieter Hooimeijer
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  2. Margus Veanes
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. UC San Diego, USA

    Ranjit Jhala

  2. Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, 234 Nichols Hall, 66506, Manhattan, KS, USA

    David Schmidt

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Hooimeijer, P., Veanes, M. (2011). An Evaluation of Automata Algorithms for String Analysis. In: Jhala, R., Schmidt, D. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6538. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-18274-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-18275-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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