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Detecting defects in Erlang programs using static analysis

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Konstantinos SagonasAuthors Info & Claims

PPDP '07: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming

Page 37

https://doi.org/10.1145/1273920.1273926

Published: 14 July 2007 Publication History

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Abstract

This talk will review the main techniques used in the Dialyzer (Discrepancy AnaLYZer of ERlang programs) defect detection tool. Dialyzer employs various forms of static program analysis to automatically identify software errors in large applications written in Erlang, a concurrent functional language developed by Ericsson and commonly used for developing telecommunications software. Dialyzer is completely automatic, relatively fast, requires no annotations from its user to detect defects, and is exceptional in that it does not report any false positives. The heart of Dialyzer's analysis is inter-modular inference of success typings for Erlang functions and the talk will explain what success typings are and how they differ from type inference in statically typed language.

Dialyzer, which nowadays is part of the Erlang/OTP (Open Telecom Platform) system, has been applied to large code bases of Erlang code and has identified a significant number of software defects that have remained unnoticed after years of extensive testing. The talk will also describe experiences and main lessons learned from Dialyzer's development and from feedback from its user community.

More information about the tool and a set of related publications can be found in Dialyzer's website: http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/dialyzer.

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Rodríguez FCastro LAronis SBieniusa A(2021)Detecting oxbow code in Erlang codebases with the highest degree of certaintyProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3471871.3472961(28-40)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3471871.3472961

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Detecting defects in Erlang programs using static analysis

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This invited talk will present the key ideas in the design and implementation of Dialyzer, a static analysis tool for Erlang programs. Dialyzer started as a defect detection tool using a rather ad hoc dataflow analysis to detect type errors in Erlang ...

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PPDP '07: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming

July 2007

240 pages

ISBN:9781595937698

DOI:10.1145/1273920

General Chair:
Michael Leuschel
University of Düsseldorf, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Andreas Podelski
University of Freiburg, Germany

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 14 July 2007

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PPDP07: Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming

July 14 - 16, 2007

Wroclaw, Poland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 230 of 486 submissions, 47%

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Rodríguez FCastro LAronis SBieniusa A(2021)Detecting oxbow code in Erlang codebases with the highest degree of certaintyProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Erlang10.1145/3471871.3472961(28-40)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3471871.3472961

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Bidirectional typing for Erlang

InfERL: scalable and extensible Erlang static analysis

Using static analysis to detect type errors and concurrency defects in erlang programs

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