Using Off-the-Shelf Exception Support Components in C++ Verification

Authors:
  • VSVladimir Still
    Vladimir Still
  • PRPetr Rockai
    Petr Rockai
  • JBJiri Barnat
    Jiri Barnat
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Abstract
An important step toward adoption of formal methods in software development is support for mainstream programming languages. Unfortunately, these languages are often rather complex and come with substantial standard libraries. However, by choosing a suitable intermediate language, most of the complexity can be delegated to existing execution-oriented (as opposed to verification-oriented) compiler frontends and standard library implementations. In this paper, we describe how support for C++ exceptions can take advantage of the same principle. Our work is based on DiVM, an LLVM-derived, verification-friendly intermediate language. Our implementation consists of 2 parts: an implementation of the 'libunwind' platform API which is linked to the program under test and consists of 9 C functions. The other part is a preprocessor for LLVM bitcode which prepares exception-related metadata and replaces associated special-purpose LLVM instructions.