Resource Bound Certification for a Tail-Recursive Virtual Machine

We define a method to statically bound the size of values computed during the execution of a program as a function of the size of its parameters. More precisely, we consider bytecode programs that should be executed on a simple stack machine with support for algebraic data types, pattern-matching and tail-recursion. Our size verification method is expressed as a static analysis, performed at the level of the bytecode, that relies on machine-checkable certificates. We follow here the usual assumption that code and certificates may be forged and should be checked before execution.

Our approach extends a system of static analyses based on the notion of quasi-interpretations that has already been used to enforce resource bounds on first-order functional programs. This paper makes two additional contributions. First, we are able to check optimized programs, containing instructions for unconditional jumps and tail-recursive calls, and remove restrictions on the structure of the bytecode that was imposed in previous works. Second, we propose a direct algorithm that depends only on solving a set of arithmetical constraints.