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Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems

APLAS 2021: Programming Languages and Systems pp 163–181Cite as

The Choice Construct in the Soufflé Language

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 13008))

Abstract

Datalog has become a popular implementation language for solving large-scale, real world problems, including bug finders, network analysis tools, and disassemblers. These applications express complex behaviour with hundreds of relations and rules that often require a non-deterministic choice for tuples in relations to express worklist algorithms.

This work is an experience report that describes the implementation of a choice construct in the Datalog engine Soufflé. With the choice construct we can express worklist algorithms such as spanning trees in a few lines of code. We highlight the differences between rule-based choice as described in prior work, and relation-based choice introduced by this work. We show that a choice construct enables certain worklist algorithms to be computed up to 10k\(\times \) faster than having no choice construct.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Xiaowen Hu, Joshua Karp, David Zhao, Abdul Zreika, Xi Wu & Bernhard Scholz

Authors
  1. Xiaowen Hu
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  2. Joshua Karp
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  3. David Zhao
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  4. Abdul Zreika
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  5. Xi Wu
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  6. Bernhard Scholz
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Correspondence to Bernhard Scholz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Korea University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of)

    Hakjoo Oh

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Hu, X., Karp, J., Zhao, D., Zreika, A., Wu, X., Scholz, B. (2021). The Choice Construct in the Soufflé Language. In: Oh, H. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13008. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89051-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89051-3_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-89050-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-89051-3

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