AutoProof: Auto-active Functional Verification of Object-oriented Programs

TL;DR

AutoProof is an advanced auto-active verifier for object-oriented programs that combines automation with user annotations, supporting complex features and demonstrating strong performance on benchmark problems.

Contribution

It introduces AutoProof, a novel verifier that supports advanced object-oriented features and provides a practical methodology for functional verification.

Findings

AutoProof supports complex object-oriented features.

AutoProof performs competitively on benchmark problems.

AutoProof effectively verifies idiomatic object-oriented patterns.

Abstract

Auto-active verifiers provide a level of automation intermediate between fully automatic and interactive: users supply code with annotations as input while benefiting from a high level of automation in the back-end. This paper presents AutoProof, a state-of-the-art auto-active verifier for object-oriented sequential programs with complex functional specifications. AutoProof fully supports advanced object-oriented features and a powerful methodology for framing and class invariants, which make it applicable in practice to idiomatic object-oriented patterns. The paper focuses on describing AutoProof's interface, design, and implementation features, and demonstrates AutoProof's performance on a rich collection of benchmark problems. The results attest AutoProof's competitiveness among tools in its league on cutting-edge functional verification of object-oriented programs.