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A Formal Semantics of the GraalVM Intermediate Representation

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Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12971))

Abstract

The optimization phase of a compiler is responsible for transforming an intermediate representation (IR) of a program into a more efficient form. Modern optimizers, such as that used in the GraalVM compiler, use an IR consisting of a sophisticated graph data structure that combines data flow and control flow into the one structure. As part of a wider project on the verification of optimization passes of GraalVM, this paper describes a semantics for its IR within Isabelle/HOL. The semantics consists of a big-step operational semantics for data nodes (which are represented in a graph-based static single assignment (SSA) form) and a small-step operational semantics for handling control flow including heap-based reads and writes, exceptions, and method calls. We have proved a suite of canonicalization optimizations and conditional elimination optimizations with respect to the semantics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A more abstract representation would be better but using natural numbers allows us to utilise Isabelle code generation facilities.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/dacapobench/dacapobench.

  3. 3.

    In Isabelle/HOL “\(S \Rightarrow T\)” is the type of a function from S to T.

  4. 4.

    All theories are available at https://github.com/uqcyber/veriopt-releases/tree/atva2021.

  5. 5.

    The operation for allocating a new object could nondeterministically choose any unused object reference, but we have made it a deterministic function that allocates the next location to facilitate the use of Isabelle code generation facilities.

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Acknowledgements

Mark Utting’s position and Brae Webb’s scholarship are both funded in part by a gift from Oracle Labs. Thanks especially to Cristina Cifuentes, Paddy Krishnan and Andrew Craik from Oracle Labs Brisbane for their helpful feedback, and to the Oracle GraalVM compiler team for answering questions. Thanks to Chris Seaton for helping us extend the SeaFoam IR visualization tool to output the graph in Isabelle syntax. Thanks also to Kristian Thomassen for his work on the semantics of \(\phi \)-nodes and Sadra Bayat Tork who investigated IR graph invariants in the GraalVM compiler.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

    Brae J. Webb, Mark Utting & Ian J. Hayes

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  1. Brae J. Webb
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  2. Mark Utting
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Correspondence to Brae J. Webb .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Zhe Hou

  2. University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Vijay Ganesh

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Webb, B.J., Utting, M., Hayes, I.J. (2021). A Formal Semantics of the GraalVM Intermediate Representation. In: Hou, Z., Ganesh, V. (eds) Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis. ATVA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12971. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88885-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88885-5_8

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