STATOR:Establishing code-base

Here we list pros and cons of all our approaches towards establishing STATOR's code-base. All pros/cons are listed in the order from the most important to the least one. We further assign for all listed pros/cons a global "importance level", which is a number in [1,...,10].

Main implementation language

Java

• pros
  • Huge standard library
  • We can take a lot of code from tools like CPAchecker and Stanse with minimal effort.
  • Many students know it.

• cons
  • May slow down implementation of program analyses, symbolic manipulations of data structures may require more programming effort then in languages like OCaml or F#.

F#

• pros
  • May provide faster implementation of program analyses, because symbolic manipulations of particular data structures (like syntax trees, expressions, BDD,...)
  • We can move to Windows and thus develop STATOR in Visual Studio.
  • It is a modern language built on top of huge and established .NET platform.
  • We can take a C front end from tools like CPAchecker and Stanse with minimal effort. It only requires to dump internal CFG representations of the tools to disc and load them into equivalent data structures syntactically expressed in F#.

• cons
  • Not many people knows it, but the situation improves.
  • Development in Mono can be less comfortable. Also support of F# in Mono known to us yet. Similarly, state of standard library is not know.
  • Portability mostly depends on qualities of Mono.

OCaml

• pros
  • May provide faster implementation of program analyses, because symbolic manipulations of particular data structures (like syntax trees, expressions, BDD,...)
  • OCaml development environments are still immature and primitive
  • We can take a C front end from tools like CPAchecker and Stanse with minimal effort. It only requires to dump internal CFG representations of the tools to disc and load them into equivalent data structures syntactically expressed in OCaml.

• cons
  • Not many people knows it, but the situation improves.

C++

• pros
  • a

• cons
  • a