Checking Data Structure Properties Orders Of Magnitude Faster

Executable formal contracts help verify a program at runtime when static verification fails. However, these contracts may be prohibitively slow to execute, especially when they describe the transformations of data structures. In fact, often an efficient data structure operation with O(log(n)) running time executes in O(n log(n)) when naturally written specifications are executed at run time.We present a set of techniques that improve the efficiency of run-time checks by orders of magnitude, often recovering the original asymptotic behavior of operations. Our implementation first removes any statically verified parts of checks. Then, it applies a program transformation that changes recursively computed properties into data structure fields, ensuring that properties are evaluated no more than once on a given data structure node. We present evaluation of our techniques on the Leon system for verification of purely functional programs.