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Towards Symbolic Execution in Erlang

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Perspectives of System Informatics (PSI 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8974))

Abstract

The concurrent functional language Erlang has a number of distinguishing features, like dynamic typing, concurrency via asynchronous message passing or hot code loading, that make it especially appropriate for distributed, fault-tolerant, soft real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce a symbolic execution technique for Erlang. We discuss how both an overapproximation and an underapproximation of the concrete semantics can be obtained. We illustrate our approach through some examples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to formalize symbolic execution in the context of this language, where previous approaches have only considered exploring different schedulings but have not dealt with symbolic data.

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación) under grant TIN2013-44742-C4-1-R and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO/2011/052.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. MiST, DSIC, Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera, S/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain

    Germán Vidal

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  1. Germán Vidal
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Correspondence to Germán Vidal .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Andrei Voronkov

  2. A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Irina Virbitskaite

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Vidal, G. (2015). Towards Symbolic Execution in Erlang. In: Voronkov, A., Virbitskaite, I. (eds) Perspectives of System Informatics. PSI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8974. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46823-4_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46823-4_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-46822-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-46823-4

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