Mihai Nicola

dblp:358/7507 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
2ranked-venue papers
1as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-0204-1626ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Abstract Interpretation of Temporal Safety Effects of Higher Order Programs
abstract
This paper describes a new abstract interpretation -based approach to verify temporal safety properties of recursive, higher-order programs. While prior works have provided theoretical impact and some automation, they have had limited scalability. We begin with a new automata-based “abstract effect domain” for summarizing context-sensitive dependent effects, capable of abstracting relations between the program environment and the automaton control state. Our analysis includes a new transformer for abstracting event prefixes to automatically computed context-sensitive effect summaries, and is instantiated in a type-and-effect system grounded in abstract interpretation. Since the analysis is parametric on the automaton, we next instantiate it to a broader class of history/register (or “accumulator”) automata, beyond finite state automata to express some context-free properties, input-dependency, event summation, resource usage, cost, equal event magnitude, etc. We implemented a prototype ev Drift that computes dependent effect summaries (and validates assertions) for OCaml-like recursive higher-order programs. As a basis of comparison, we describe reductions to assertion checking for higher-order but effect-free programs, and demonstrate that our approach outperforms prior tools Drift , RCaml / Spacer , MoCHi , and ReTHFL . Overall, across a set of 23 benchmarks, Drift verified 12 benchmarks, RCaml/Spacer verified 6, MoCHi verified 11, ReTHFL verified 18, and ev Drift verified 21; ev Drift also achieved a 6.3×, 5.3×, 16.8×, and 6.4× speedup over Drift , RCami/Spacer , MoCHi , and ReTHFL , respectively, on those benchmarks that both tools could solve.
Mihai Nicola, Chaitanya Agarwal, Eric Koskinen, Thomas Wies
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.1
2023 Better Predicates and Heuristics for Improved Commutativity Synthesis
Adam Chen, Parisa Fathololumi, Mihai Nicola, Jared Pincus, Tegan Brennan, Eric Koskinen
ATVA3