Abstract ESBMC v7.7 improves the verification of concurrent C programs by incorporating techniques such as dynamic thread scheduling, incremental SMT solving, and partial order reduction (POR). These improvements enhance the tool’s performance, particularly in exploring complex multi-threaded executions. The new scheduler prioritizes higher-thread identifiers during context switches, which helps explore deeper program states. The use of incremental SMT solving and a refined POR algorithm reduces the exploration of unreachable interleavings and redundant states. These updates enable ESBMC to detect bugs faster, making it a more effective tool for ensuring the safety of multi-threaded applications.

This paper presents Efficient SMT-Based Context-Bounded Model Checker (ESBMC) v7.6, an extended version based on previous work on ESBMC v7.3 by K. Song et al. [1] . The v7.3 introduced a new Clang-based C++ front-end to address the challenges posed by modern C++ programs. Although the new front-end has demonstrated significant potential in previous studies, it remains in the developmental stage and lacks several essential features. ESBMC v7.6 further enhanced this foundation by adding and extending features based on the Clang AST, such as exception handling, extended memory management and memory safety verification, including dangling pointers, duplicate deallocation, memory leaks and rvalue references and new operational models for STL updating the outdated C++ operational models. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ESBMC v7.6 can handle a significantly broader range of C++ features introduced in recent versions of the C++ standard.

Abstract ESBMC implements many state-of-the-art techniques that combine abstract interpretation and model checking. Here, we report on new and improved features that allow us to obtain verification results for previously unsupported programs and properties. ESBMC now employs a new static interval analysis of expressions in programs to increase verification performance. This includes interval-based reasoning over booleans and integers, and forward-backward contractors. Other relevant improvements concern the verification of concurrent programs, as well as several operational models, internal ones, and also those of libraries such as pthread and the C mathematics library. An extended memory safety analysis now allows tracking of memory leaks that are considered still reachable.