Quantified Data Automata on Skinny Trees: an Abstract Domain for Lists

Abstract: We propose a new approach to heap analysis through an abstract domain of automata, called automatic shapes. The abstract domain uses a particular kind of automata, called quantified data automata on skinny trees (QSDAs), that allows to define universally quantified properties of singly-linked lists. To ensure convergence of the abstract fixed-point computation, we introduce a sub-class of QSDAs called elastic QSDAs, which also form an abstract domain. We evaluate our approach on several list manipulating programs and we show that the proposed domain is powerful enough to prove a large class of these programs correct.