ikos VS Graal

I beg to differ: there are a few tools which are comparable.

Frama-C (https://www.frama-c.com) is an open source framework that has, among its analyzers, one based on abstract interpretation (https://www.frama-c.com/fc-plugins/eva.html) that is very similar in spirit to Astree.

MOPSA (https://mopsa.lip6.fr) is another open-source project (albeit more recent, and in a more "academic" stage) that also provides abstract interpretation to analyze C programs for flaws.

NASA also released IKOS (https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos), on the same vein.

Of course they lack the polish of a product which costs tens of thousands of euros per license, but they are open source, and their purpose is the same: to ensure code safety via formal methods, in particular abstract interpretation.

It is possible to get these tools to analyze some code and generate no complaints, which ensures absence of several kinds of problems, such as memory safety issues.

Then again, it's hard to know exactly how much they differ from Astree, since you need a license to compare them, and I don't even know if you are allowed to publish such comparisons.

I've been playing around with running IKOS (https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos), it sounds very cool but doesn't seem to be super well maintained. I've managed to compile my project to llvm bit-code and run the IKSO on it, but the actual analysis seems to be buggy. There are open issues for the problems I encountered, but the make the analysis pretty useless (it thinks most functions are unreachable).

> https://www.absint.com/astree/index.htm

This looks interesting. It's based on abstract interpretation which is more or less the most powerful approach for imperative code available. (Because the way it works it's likely slow as hell though, I guess).

But it's closed source. One of this kind of products where you need to asks for the price… I think we all know what this means: It'll be laughably expensive.

I don't see any offer for OpenSource projects frankly.

> https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos

Also abstract interpretation based. Looks less polished than the first one at first glance.

It's under some questionable license. According to OSI it's OpenSource. According to the FSF it's not. (The FSF argument sounds strong. They're right in my opinion. This NASA license does not look like OpenSource).

But an OpenSource project could use it for free I assume.

> https://github.com/static-analysis-engineering/CodeHawk-C

Much more constrained in scope than the other ones. But looks a little bit "too academic" imho: Uses its own C parser and such.

At least it's OpenSource under MIT license.

Thanks for the links either way! Good to know about some tools in case one would need them at some point.

> I have planned to try using them on OpenZFS for a while, but I am still busy reviewing and fixing reports made by conventional static analyzers.

Stupid question about usual C development practices (as I don't have much contact with that):

Aren't analyzers today part of the build pipeline form the get go? Especially as C is known to be full of booby traps.

Imho it shouldn't be even possible to push anything that has issues discovered by tools.

This should be the lowest barrier as most code analyzers are at most able to spot quite obvious problems (the commercial one above is likely an exception to this "rule"). When even the usual "stupid analyzer" sees issues than the code is very likely in a very bad shape.

Adding such tools later on in the development is like activating warnings post factum: You'll get drowned in issues.

Especially in such critical domains as file-systems I would actually expect that the developers are using "the best tools money can buy" (or at least the best OpenSource tools available).

"Still fixing bugs found by some code analyzer" doesn't sound like someone should have much trust with their data in something like ZFS, to be honest… The statement sounds actually quite scary to me.

They have very unusual license which I have never seen before: https://github.com/NASA-SW-VnV/ikos/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Is anyone familiar with it? Is it OSI certified? (it's not on the OSI's site).

Yeah there are tools that require adding contracts as comments. But again, there are also friction-less tools that don't require any changes (for example a NASA one).

Contrary to what vocal Kotlin advocates might believe, Kotlin only matters on Android, and that is thanks to Google pushing it no matter what.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-top-programming-languages-2023

https://snyk.io/reports/jvm-ecosystem-report-2021/

And even so, they had to conceed Android and Kotlin on their own, without the Java ecosystem aren't really much useful, thus ART is now updatable via Play Store, and currently supports OpenJDK 17 LTS on Android 12 and later devices.

As for your question regarding numbers, mostly Java 74.6%, C++ 13.7%, on the OpenJDK, other JVM implementations differ, e.g. GraalVM is mostly Java 91.8%, C 3.6%.

https://github.com/openjdk/jdk

https://github.com/oracle/graal

Two examples from many others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines

Pkl was built using the GraalVM Truffle framework. So it supports runtime compilation using Futurama Projections. We have been working with Apple on this for a while, and I am quite happy that we can finally read the sources!

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/truffle

Disclaimer: graalvm dev here.

That's pretty interesting. It's not as aggressive as Bee sounds, but the Espresso JVM is somewhat similar in concept. It's a full blown JVM written in Java with all the mod cons, which can either be compiled ahead of time down to memory-efficient native code giving something similar to a JVM written in C++, or run itself as a Java application on top of another JVM. In the latter mode it obviously doesn't achieve top-tier performance, but the advantage is you can easily hack on it using all the regular Java tools, including hotswapping using the debugger.

When run like this, the bytecode interpreter, runtime system and JIT compiler are all regular Java that can be debugged, edited, explored in the IDE, recompiled quickly and so on. Only the GC is provided by the host system. If you compile it to native code, the GC is also written in Java (with some special conventions to allow for convenient direct memory access).

What's most interesting is that Espresso isn't a direct translation of what a classical C++ VM would look like. It's built on the Truffle framework, so the code is extremely high level compared to traditional VM code. Details like how exactly transitions between the interpreter/compiled code happen, how you communicate pointer maps to the GC and so on are all abstracted away. You don't even have to invoke the JIT compiler manually, that's done for you too. The only code Espresso really needs is that which defines the semantics of the Java bytecode language and associated tools like the JDWP debugger protocol.

https://github.com/oracle/graal/tree/master/espresso

This design makes it easy to experiment with new VM features that would be too difficult or expensive to implement otherwise. For example it implements full hotswap capability that lets you arbitrarily redefine code and data on the fly. Espresso can also fully self-host recursively without limit, meaning you can achieve something like what's described in the paper by running Espresso on top of Espresso.

I'm also using GraalVM if that's of any help.

Quarkus is one of Java frameworks for microservices development and cloud-native deployment. It is developed as container-first stack and working with GraalVM and HotSpot virtual machines (VM).

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply DCEVM went poof, just that I was sad it didn't make it into OpenJDK so one need not do JDK silliness between the production one and the "debugging one" since my experience is that's an absolutely stellar way to produce Heisenbugs

And I'll be straight: Graal scares me 'cause Oracle but I just checked and it looks to the casual observer that it's straight-up GPLv2 now so maybe my fears need revisiting: https://github.com/oracle/graal/blob/vm-23.1.0/LICENSE

> to be compiled to a single executable is a strength that Java does not have

I think this is very outdated claim: https://www.graalvm.org/

https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/7182