Invariant Detection with Program Verification Tools

Abstract: Compilers can specialize programs having invariants for performance improvement. Detecting program invariants that span large and complex code, however, is difficult for compilers. Traditional compilers do not perform very expensive analysis and thus only identify limited invariants, which limits the potential of subsequent optimizations. We would like to address the invariant detection problem via more sophisticated analyses using program verification tools. In this paper, we reveal pitfalls of choosing program verification tools for invariant detection, identify challenges of modeling program behavior using one of these tools---CVC4, and propose some ideas about how to address the challenges.