Sub-Turing Islands in the Wild
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Recently, there has been growing debate as to whether or not static analysis can be truly sound. In spite of this concern, research on techniques seeking to at least partially answer undecidable questions has a long history. However, little attention has been given to the more empirical question of how often an exact solution might be given to a question despite the question being, at least in theory, undecidable. This paper investigates this issue by exploring sub-Turing islands – regions of code for which a question of interest is decidable. We define such islands and then consider how to identify them. We implemented Cook, a prototype for finding sub-Turing islands and applied it to a corpus of 1100 Android applications, containing over 2 million methods. Results reveal that 55% of the all methods are sub-Turing. Our results also provide empirical, scientific evidence for the scalability of sub-Turing island identification. Sub-Turing identification has many downstream applications, because islands are so amenable to static analysis. We illustrate two downstream uses of the analysis. In the first, we found that over 37% of the verification conditions associated with runtime exceptions fell within sub-Turing islands and thus are statically decidable. A second use of our analysis is during code review where it provides guidance to developers. The sub-Turing islands from our study turns out to contain significantly fewer bugs than `theswamp' (non sub-Turing methods). The greater bug density in the swamp is unsurprising; the fact that bugs remain prevalent in islands is, however, surprising: these are bugs whose repair can be fully automated.
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