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.

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).

• An interpreter and a compiler that targets parallel C++ (C++ that uses OpenMP). Both the interpreter and compiler use semi-naïve evaluation.
• Stratified negation
• Aggregation
• Automatic index selection
• Specialized parallel data structures, including disjoint-sets, B-trees, and tries.
• Static typing
• Records and algebraic data types
• A foreign function interface

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

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

Soufflé has been used to build static analyzers, including:

• A pointer analysis for Java
• A control-flow analysis for Scheme
• Various analyses for smart contract languages

It has also been used to build tools for binary analysis, including reverse engineering, and disassemblers.

• 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.

• Project homepage
• souffle on GitHub