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Comment by itsspring | Hacker News Reader

I want to read more on this topic. Have you written about this anywhere, or do you have a pointer/suggestion?

This article gets more into actual analysis of program state and execution: http://matt.might.net/articles/intro-static-analysis/

If you want to go deeper, Principles of Program Analysis is a popular reference: Principles of Program Analysis https://www.amazon.com/dp/3540654100/

I would not recommend POPA to people wanting to go down this road, its an extremely difficult text. Personally, just my 2 cents here, a far more useful text would be Practical Binary Analysis, https://practicalbinaryanalysis.com/ The Cousant's text is fascinating but requires a level of mathematical maturity at virtually post-doc researcher levels

Principles of Program Analysis isn't the Cousot's text, but it does make significant use of abstract math. In particular, it uses tools from order theory[0] to describe many program analysis algorithms as finding fixpoints of functions between lattices[1].

This is useful because it reduces many program analysis design questions to questions of which lattice to use. It also allows you to compare algorithms by comparing their lattices, which makes it easier to see how algorithms are related.

The cost is that this approach will be pretty alien if you don't have experience with abstract algebra or related fields. If you do have that experience, I don't think it requires mathematical maturity beyond an undergraduate level.

[0] http://matt.might.net/articles/partial-orders/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice_(order)

You're correct on the Cousot text, thank you. I stand by the assertion that if people want to go beyond the simple PA described in the article a far better and more approachable text is the binary analysis one I listed. Practical hands on experience that doesn't require a math major in uni is a good thing!

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