Safe Composition of Non-Monotonic Features

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (M. Kuhlemann, D. Batory, C. Kästner)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Martin Kuhlemann, Don Batory, and Christian Kästner. Safe Composition of Non-Monotonic Features. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE), ISBN 978-1-60558-828-5, pages 177--185, New York, NY: ACM Press, October 2009.

Programs can be composed from features. We want to verify automatically that all legal combinations of features can be composed safely without errors. Prior work on this problem assumed that features add code monotonically. We generalize prior work to enable features to both add and remove code, describe our analyses and implementation, and review case studies. We observe that more expressive features can increase the complexity of developed programs rapidly – up to the point where automated concepts as presented in this paper are not a helpful tool but a necessity for verification.