Overview

FreeBoogie aims to be an open source alternative to the Boogie backend of the Spec# system. Its input is a program description written in the Boogie Programming Language (aka BoogiePL, aka BPL). The BoogiePL was designed as a suitable intermediate representation for extended static checkers. There are two main advantages of relying on BoogiePL for your static analyses:

  1. The textual representation of the intermediate data structures of your analyzer makes it much easier to debug.
  2. The very loose coupling between frontend and backend means that in order to support l languages and a analyzes you need to implement l+a tools instead of la.

Of course, having a textual representation comes with the added hassle of needing a parser, name resolution, type-checking. FreeBoogie helps developers because it contains an implementation of these rather boring but necessary things.

In the long term we see FreeBoogie as a platform to experiment with features of BoogiePL, with various ways of doing verification condition generation, with different ways to do abstract interpretation, and so on. In the short term we aim to make it a drop-in replacement for Microsoft's proprietary Boogie implementation.

Installation

To try FreeBoogie follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have Java 6 installed.
  2. Download the latest release.
  3. Unzip the downloaded file.
  4. Run ./fb -help and then try it on an example.
  5. Read the API to see how you can use FreeBoogie as a component in your own program and to have an overview of how it's organized.

BoogiePL is an evolving language. The output produced by the last version of Spec# may not be processed correctly by the last version of FreeBoogie. You may be luckier if you use the SVN version of FreeBoogie, which you will probably prefer anyway if you want to use FreeBoogie in your own program and contribute to it.

To try the SVN version follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have ANT installed.
  2. svn co https://mobius.ucd.ie/repos/src/freeboogie/trunk/FreeBoogie
  3. cd FreeBoogie
  4. source setenv
  5. ant — compilation should be successful
  6. ant test — may fail during the development of important new features
  7. ant doc — generated API documentation in the directory doc
  8. Run FreeBoogie by typing fbrun freeboogie.Main -help. You can also type fbrun C to run the small tests in the main method of the class C.
  9. View the README file for the most up-to-date status of the project.
  10. View the TODO file to see what we are working on right now.
  11. If you find a bug or a piece of code that can be improved then please go ahead and fix it. The files in the editor directory should be of help when editing bpl files by hand.

FreeBoogie is now available as an Eclipse plugin from the MOBIUS update site:

http://kind.ucd.ie/products/opensource/Mobius/updates/

If any of the steps above does not work as advertised then please let us know by writing an email to radugrigore at gmail.com.

License

This is an MIT License.

Copyright (c) 2007–2008 University College Dublin and Radu Grigore

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.