Automatically Tailoring Abstract Interpretation to Custom Usage Scenarios

Abstract In recent years, there has been significant progress in the development and industrial adoption of static analyzers, specifically of abstract interpreters. Such analyzers typically provide a large, if not huge, number of configurable options controlling the analysis precision and performance. A major hurdle in integrating them in the software-development life cycle is tuning their options to custom usage scenarios, such as a particular code base or certain resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a technique that automatically tailors an abstract interpreter to the code under analysis and any given resource constraints. We implement this technique in a framework, tAIlor, which we use to perform an extensive evaluation on real-world benchmarks. Our experiments show that the configurations generated by tAIlor are vastly better than the default analysis options, vary significantly depending on the code under analysis, and most remain tailored to several subsequent code versions.