Automatic inference of resource consumption bounds

Abstract

One of the main features of programs is the amount of resources which are needed in order to run them. Different resources can be taken into consideration, such as the number of execution steps, amount of memory allocated, number of calls to certain methods, etc. Unfortunately, manually determining the resource consumption of programs is difficult and error-prone. We provide an overview of a state of the art framework for automatically obtaining both upper and lower bounds on the resource consumption of programs. The bounds obtained are functions on the size of the input arguments to the program and are obtained statically, i.e., without running the program. Due to the approximations introduced, the framework can fail to obtain (non-trivial) bounds even if they exist. On the other hand, modulo implementation bugs, the bounds thus obtained are valid for any execution of the program. The framework has been implemented in the COSTA system and can provide useful bounds for realistic object-oriented and actor-based concurrent programs. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.