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souffle
Soufflé is a variant of Datalog for tool designers crafting analyses in Horn clauses. Soufflé synthesizes a native parallel C++ program from a logic specification.
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Consider using Datalog (the incredible subset of Prolog) for this perfect use case. Compared to Prolog, you get:
1. Free de-duplication. No more debugging why a predicate is returning the same result more than once.
2. Commutativity. Order of predicates does not change the result. Finally, true logic programming!
3. Easy static analysis. There are many papers that describe how to do points-to analysis (and other similar techniques) with Datalog rules that fit on a single page :O
Souffle[0] is a mature Datalog that is highly performant and has many nice features. I highly recommend playing with it!
[0] https://souffle-lang.github.io
> The overall goal would be to figure out classical error conditions like nill pointers deference.
> If I can figure out if a pointer will be nil in some execution branch, there is no reason why a computer cannot do the same.
Note, this is called flow-sensitive typing (also called type narrowing) and I think that typescript does it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-sensitive_typing
> I personally would see this as an human race level upgrades. Imagine feeding your code to a CI that spit back something like: "you will have a panic at line 156 when your input is > 4"
A model checker can do that!
See this
https://model-checking.github.io/kani/tutorial-kinds-of-fail...
Other techniques are also possible
https://github.com/viperproject/prusti-dev#quick-example
(Here I could link a lot of things, I just selected two Rust projects to illustrate)
This works better if you are able to provide contracts in your API that says which guarantees you provide. Alternatively, asserts are useful too.
I am using this idea to build an ai-first, reactive IDE (after talking to marcelle, who's brilliant). DM me at @eating_entropy on Twitter or email me at [email protected] if you are interested.
Also it seems tree-edit implements something similar using reazon, a relational language library in elisp.
https://github.com/ethan-leba/tree-edit
Here's Niko Matsakis's embeddable logic engine in rust, to be used in the rust compiler's type system.
https://github.com/nikomatsakis/chalk-ndm