text: We present a framework in Isabelle for verifying asymptotic time complexity of imperative programs. We build upon an extension of Imperative HOL and its separation logic to include running time. Our framework is able to handle advanced techniques for time complexity analysis, such as the use of the Akra–Bazzi theorem and amortized analysis. Various automation is built and incorporated into the auto2 prover to reason about separation logic with time credits, and to derive asymptotic behaviour of functions. As case studies, we verify the asymptotic time complexity (in addition to functional correctness) of imperative algorithms and data structures such as median of medians selection, Karatsuba’s algorithm, and splay trees.
  @cite_6: This paper addresses the problem of automatically performing resource-bound analysis, which can help programmers understand the performance characteristics of their programs. We introduce a method for resource-bound inference that (i) is compositional, (ii) produces machine-checkable certificates of the resource bounds obtained, and (iii) features a sound mechanism for user interaction if the inference fails. The technique handles recursive procedures and has the ability to exploit any known program invariants. An experimental evaluation with an implementation in the tool Pastis shows that the new analysis is competitive with state-of-the-art resource-bound tools while also creating Coq certificates.
  @cite_19: 
  @cite_2: We study the problem of automatically analyzing the worst-case resource usage of procedures with several arguments. Existing automatic analyses based on amortization, or sized types bound the resource usage or result size of such a procedure by a sum of unary functions of the sizes of the arguments. In this paper we generalize this to arbitrary multivariate polynomial functions thus allowing bounds of the form mn which had to be grossly overestimated by m2+n2 before. Our framework even encompasses bounds like ∗i,j≤n m_i mj where the mi are the sizes of the entries of a list of length n. This allows us for the first time to derive useful resource bounds for operations on matrices that are represented as lists of lists and to considerably improve bounds on other super-linear operations on lists such as longest common subsequence and removal of duplicates from lists of lists. Furthermore, resource bounds are now closed under composition which improves accuracy of the analysis of composed programs when some or all of the components exhibit super-linear resource or size behavior. The analysis is based on a novel multivariate amortized resource analysis. We present it in form of a type system for a simple first-order functional language with lists and trees, prove soundness, and describe automatic type inference based on linear programming. We have experimentally validated the automatic analysis on a wide range of examples from functional programming with lists and trees. The obtained bounds were compared with actual resource consumption. All bounds were asymptotically tight, and the constants were close or even identical to the optimal ones.
  @cite_5: This paper presents a new approach for automatically deriving worst-case resource bounds for C programs. The described technique combines ideas from amortized analysis and abstract interpretation in a unified framework to address four challenges for state-of-the-art techniques: compositionality, user interaction, generation of proof certificates, and scalability. Compositionality is achieved by incorporating the potential method of amortized analysis. It enables the derivation of global whole-program bounds with local derivation rules by naturally tracking size changes of variables in sequenced loops and function calls. The resource consumption of functions is described abstractly and a function call can be analyzed without access to the function body. User interaction is supported with a new mechanism that clearly separates qualitative and quantitative verification. A user can guide the analysis to derive complex non-linear bounds by using auxiliary variables and assertions. The assertions are separately proved using established qualitative techniques such as abstract interpretation or Hoare logic. Proof certificates are automatically generated from the local derivation rules. A soundness proof of the derivation system with respect to a formal cost semantics guarantees the validity of the certificates. Scalability is attained by an efficient reduction of bound inference to a linear optimization problem that can be solved by off-the-shelf LP solvers. The analysis framework is implemented in the publicly-available tool C4B. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the advantages of the new technique with a comparison of C4B with existing tools on challenging micro benchmarks and the analysis of more than 2900 lines of C code from the cBench benchmark suite.
  @cite_10: This article presents a resource analysis system for OCaml programs. The system automatically derives worst-case resource bounds for higher-order polymorphic programs with user-defined inductive types. The technique is parametric in the resource and can derive bounds for time, memory allocations and energy usage. The derived bounds are multivariate resource polynomials which are functions of different size parameters that depend on the standard OCaml types. Bound inference is fully automatic and reduced to a linear optimization problem that is passed to an off-the-shelf LP solver. Technically, the analysis system is based on a novel multivariate automatic amortized resource analysis (AARA). It builds on existing work on linear AARA for higher-order programs with user-defined inductive types and on multivariate AARA for first-order programs with built-in lists and binary trees. This is the first amortized analysis, that automatically derives polynomial bounds for higher-order functions and polynomial bounds that depend on user-defined inductive types. Moreover, the analysis handles a limited form of side effects and even outperforms the linear bound inference of previous systems. At the same time, it preserves the expressivity and efficiency of existing AARA techniques. The practicality of the analysis system is demonstrated with an implementation and integration with Inria's OCaml compiler. The implementation is used to automatically derive resource bounds for 411 functions and 6018 lines of code derived from OCaml libraries, the CompCert compiler, and implementations of textbook algorithms. In a case study, the system infers bounds on the number of queries that are sent by OCaml programs to DynamoDB, a commercial NoSQL cloud database service.
summary: On the other end of the scale we want to mention Automatic Amortized Resource Analysis (AARA). Possibly the first example of a resource analysis logic based on potentials is due to Hofmann and Jost @cite_19 . They pioneer the use of potentials coded into the type system in order to automatically extract bounds in the runtime of functional programs. successfully developed this idea further @cite_2 @cite_10 . @cite_5 @cite_6 extend this work to imperative programs and automatically solve extracted inequalities by efficient off-the-shelf LP-solvers. While the potentials involved are restricted to a specific shape, the analysis performs well and at the same time generates Coq proof objects certifying their resulting bounds.