Soufflé (programming language)

Soufflé is an open source parallel logic programming language, influenced by Datalog. Soufflé includes both an interpreter and a compiler that targets parallel C++. Soufflé has been used to build static analyzers, disassemblers, and tools for binary reverse engineering. Soufflé is considered by academic researchers to be high-performance and "state of the art," and is often used in benchmarks in academic papers.^[2][3][4]

Soufflé

Paradigms	Declarative, Logic programming
Family	Datalog
Stable release	2.3[1]
Typing discipline	Static
License	UPL
Filename extensions	.dl
Website	souffle-lang.github.io
Influenced by
Datalog

Programming examples

Given a set of edges in a graph, the following program computes the set of (directed) paths between any two nodes. This is also known as the transitive closure of the edge relation.

.decl edge(x:number, y:number)
.input edge

.decl path(x:number, y:number)
.output path

path(x, y) :- edge(x, y).
path(x, y) :- path(x, z), edge(z, y).

Features

• An interpreter^[5] and a compiler^[6] that targets parallel C++ (C++ that uses OpenMP). Both the interpreter and compiler use semi-naïve evaluation.^[7]
• Stratified negation^[8]
• Aggregation^[9]
• Automatic index selection^[10]
• Specialized parallel data structures,^[11] including disjoint-sets,^[12] B-trees,^[13] and tries.^[14]
• Static typing^[15]
• Records and algebraic data types^[16]
• A foreign function interface^[17]

Related tools

In addition to a compiler and an interpreter, the Soufflé project also publishes:

• a profiler,
• a "provenance"-based debugger,^[18]
• an "auto-scheduler" (also called a "join optimizer") that chooses efficient query plans based on a profile, as in profile-guided optimization.^[19]

Applications

Soufflé has been used to build static analyzers, including:

• A pointer analysis for Java^[20]
• A control-flow analysis for Scheme^[21]
• Various analyses for smart contract languages^[22]

It has also been used to build tools for binary analysis, including reverse engineering,^[23] and disassemblers.^[24]

References

1. "Release Release 2.3 · souffle-lang/souffle". GitHub. Retrieved 2023-02-26.
2. Ketsman, Bas; Koutris, Paraschos (2022-06-28). "Modern Datalog Engines". Foundations and Trends in Databases. 12 (1): 1–68. doi:10.1561/1900000073. ISSN 1931-7883.
3. Gilray, Thomas; Sahebolamri, Arash; Kumar, Sidharth; Micinski, Kristopher (2022-11-21). "Higher-Order, Data-Parallel Structured Deduction". arXiv:2211.11573 [cs.PL].
4. Sahebolamri, Arash; Gilray, Thomas; Micinski, Kristopher (2022-03-18). "Seamless deductive inference via macros". Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Compiler Construction. CC 2022. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 77–88. doi:10.1145/3497776.3517779. ISBN 978-1-4503-9183-2. S2CID 247522107.
5. Hu, Xiaowen; Zhao, David; Jordan, Herbert; Scholz, Bernhard (2021-06-15). "Artifact for Paper: An Efficient Interpreter for Datalog by De-specializing Relations". doi:10.1145/3410297. Retrieved 2023-02-26. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
6. Scholz, Bernhard; Jordan, Herbert; Subotić, Pavle; Westmann, Till (2016-03-17). "On fast large-scale program analysis in Datalog". Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Compiler Construction. CC 2016. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 196–206. doi:10.1145/2892208.2892226. ISBN 978-1-4503-4241-4. S2CID 7531543.
7. Jordan, Scholz & Subotić 2016.
8. "Rules | Soufflé • A Datalog Synthesis Tool for Static Analysis". souffle-lang.github.io. Retrieved 2023-03-03.
9. "Aggregates and Generative Functors | Soufflé • A Datalog Synthesis Tool for Static Analysis". souffle-lang.github.io. Retrieved 2023-03-03.
10. Subotić, Pavle; Jordan, Herbert; Chang, Lijun; Fekete, Alan; Scholz, Bernhard (October 2018). "Automatic index selection for large-scale datalog computation". Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. 12 (2): 141–153. doi:10.14778/3282495.3282500. ISSN 2150-8097. S2CID 53569679.
11. Jordan, Herbert; Subotić, Pavle; Zhao, David; Scholz, Bernhard (2022-01-25). "Specializing parallel data structures for Datalog". Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience. 34 (2). doi:10.1002/cpe.5643. ISSN 1532-0626. S2CID 213103253.
12. Nappa, Patrick; Zhao, David; Subotić, Pavle; Scholz, Bernhard (September 2019). "Fast Parallel Equivalence Relations in a Datalog Compiler". 2019 28th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT). pp. 82–96. doi:10.1109/PACT.2019.00015. ISBN 978-1-7281-3613-4. S2CID 204827819.
13. Jordan, Herbert; Subotić, Pavle; Zhao, David; Scholz, Bernhard (2019-02-16). "A specialized B-tree for concurrent datalog evaluation". Proceedings of the 24th Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. PPoPP '19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 327–339. doi:10.1145/3293883.3295719. ISBN 978-1-4503-6225-2. S2CID 59617209.
14. Jordan, Herbert; Subotić, Pavle; Zhao, David; Scholz, Bernhard (2019-02-17). "Brie". Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Programming Models and Applications for Multicores and Manycores. PMAM'19. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 31–40. doi:10.1145/3303084.3309490. ISBN 978-1-4503-6290-0. S2CID 239258588.
15. "Types | Soufflé • A Datalog Synthesis Tool for Static Analysis". souffle-lang.github.io. Retrieved 2023-03-03. "Soufflé is a statically typed language."
16. "Types | Soufflé • A Datalog Synthesis Tool for Static Analysis". souffle-lang.github.io. Retrieved 2023-03-04.
17. "User-Defined Functors | Soufflé • A Datalog Synthesis Tool for Static Analysis". souffle-lang.github.io. Retrieved 2023-03-03.
18. Zhao, David; Subotić, Pavle; Scholz, Bernhard (2020-04-17). "Debugging Large-scale Datalog: A Scalable Provenance Evaluation Strategy". ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. 42 (2): 7:1–7:35. doi:10.1145/3379446. ISSN 0164-0925. S2CID 218905148.
19. Arch, Samuel; Hu, Xiaowen; Zhao, David; Subotić, Pavle; Scholz, Bernhard (2022). "Building a Join Optimizer for Soufflé". In Villanueva, Alicia (ed.). Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 13474. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 83–102. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-16767-6_5. ISBN 978-3-031-16767-6.
20. Antoniadis, Triantafyllou & Smaragdakis 2017.
21. Silverman, Davis Ross; Sun, Yihao; Micinski, Kristopher; Gilray, Thomas (2021-07-27). "So You Want to Analyze Scheme Programs With Datalog?". arXiv:2107.12909 [cs.PL].
22. Tsankov, Petar; Dan, Andrei; Drachsler-Cohen, Dana; Gervais, Arthur; Bünzli, Florian; Vechev, Martin (2018-10-15). "Securify". Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security. CCS '18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 67–82. doi:10.1145/3243734.3243780. hdl:10044/1/87935. ISBN 978-1-4503-5693-0. S2CID 46936025.

    • Brent, Lexi; Jurisevic, Anton; Kong, Michael; Liu, Eric; Gauthier, Francois; Gramoli, Vincent; Holz, Ralph; Scholz, Bernhard (2018-09-11). "Vandal: A Scalable Security Analysis Framework for Smart Contracts". arXiv:1809.03981 [cs.PL].
    • Grech, Neville; Kong, Michael; Jurisevic, Anton; Brent, Lexi; Scholz, Bernhard; Smaragdakis, Yannis (2018-10-24). "MadMax: surviving out-of-gas conditions in Ethereum smart contracts". Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages. 2 (OOPSLA): 116:1–116:27. doi:10.1145/3276486. S2CID 51920261.
    • Praitheeshan, Purathani; Pan, Lei; Yu, Jiangshan; Liu, Joseph; Doss, Robin (2020-09-16). "Security Analysis Methods on Ethereum Smart Contract Vulnerabilities: A Survey". arXiv:1908.08605 [cs.CR].
23. Sun, Yihao; Ching, Jeffrey; Micinski, Kristopher (2021-01-12). "Declarative Demand-Driven Reverse Engineering". arXiv:2101.04718 [cs.PL].
24. Flores-Montoya, Antonio; Schulte, Eric (2020-08-12). "Datalog disassembly". Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Conference on Security Symposium. SEC'20. USA: USENIX Association: 1075–1092. ISBN 978-1-939133-17-5.

Sources

• Jordan, Herbert; Scholz, Bernhard; Subotić, Pavle (2016). "Soufflé: On Synthesis of Program Analyzers". In Chaudhuri, Swarat; Farzan, Azadeh (eds.). Computer Aided Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 9780. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 422–430. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-41540-6_23. ISBN 978-3-319-41540-6. S2CID 7428346.
• Antoniadis, Tony; Triantafyllou, Konstantinos; Smaragdakis, Yannis (2017-06-18). "Porting doop to Soufflé". Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on State of the Art in Program Analysis. SOAP 2017. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 25–30. doi:10.1145/3088515.3088522. ISBN 978-1-4503-5072-3. S2CID 3074689.

External links

• Project homepage
• souffle on GitHub