Why are there so few successful "real-world" programming and testing tools based on academic research? This talk focuses on program analysis tools, and proposes a surprisingly simple explanation with interesting ramifications.

There are important classes of programming errors that are hard to diagnose, both manually and automatically, because they involve a program's dynamic behavior. This article describes a compile-time analyzer that detects these dynamic errors in large, real-world programs. The analyzer traces execution paths through the source code, modeling memory and reporting inconsistencies. In addition to avoiding false paths through the program, this approach provides valuable contextual information to the programmer who needs to understand and repair the defects. Automatically-created models, abstracting the behavior of individual functions, allow inter-procedural defects to be detected efficiently. A product built on these techniques has been used effectively on several large commercial programs. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The MOST program chooses appropriate sizes for transistors in a VLSI schematic to meet specified delay criteria. A simulated annealing algorithm is used in conjunction with a timing analyzer, both written in Prolog. A screening function takes advantage of the symbolic equations provided by the timing analyzer to reject clearly inappropriate choices, so full timing analysis is performed less frequently. Despite running in an interpreted Prolog, performance gains of over 50% versus an unsized circuit can be attained in less than 10 CPU minutes.