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NOTE: The documentation on this wiki is unusably outdated and kept here for archival purposes (and possible mining for future documentation projects) only.

Information for users

Also see the README.

General information

• Supported architectures and compilers
• Configuration
• Generating input
• Standard flags accepted by every subcommand.
• Filtering predicates: the syntax of -filter-compilers and -filter-machines flags.
• The C subset act understands internally.

External tools

act interfaces with several external tools (besides compilers), which need their own set-up and configuration:

• C preprocessor (for interpreting raw C files)
• Herd (for simulating C and assembly behaviours)
• Litmus (for sampling assembly behaviours from the local machine)
• Memalloy (for generating Test input)

Command documentation

Running tests

These are the main test drivers; they combine many of the tasks done by the smaller sub-commands in the process of running tests.

• Compare: compare litmus output across compilers.
• Test: test compilers using Herd and a Memalloy-style input corpus.

Manipulating single C files and litmus tests

• C: various utilities for dealing with C files and C litmus tests; most of these expect input in the known C subset.
  • C Delitmus: convert a C litmus test into a compilable C11 program.
  • C Explain: dump various facts about a C file or litmus test.
  • C Fuzz: experimental and unfinished mutation of C litmus tests.

Manipulating single assembly files and litmus tests

• Asm: various utilities for dealing with assembly files and assembly litmus tests; many commands also accept C files, given a compiler, and run the compiler first before proceeding as normal.
  • Asm Explain (formerly explain): annotate an assembly file with act's analysis.
  • Asm Litmusify: convert a single assembly file to a litmus test.

Setting up and testing act

• Configure: various tools for dealing with act configuration.
• Regress: regression tests (used mainly by act's build process).

Miscellaneous

• Tool: run external tools like Herd and Litmus directly.
  • Tool Herd: run Herd.
  • Tool Litmus: run Litmus on the local machine.

Information for developers

• Code conventions: why things are how they are
• Converting assembly to litmus: observational notes on how we might sanitise assembly output

Libraries (and things that'll become libraries)

These are the constituent (private) libraries of act's codebase (excluding language, compiler, and simulator specific libraries, which are currently also in the codebase and pulled in by toplevel).

General libraries

• utils: General utility library
• act_common: Act common library

Language services

• abstract: Abstract program model
• language: Language abstraction layer

Main act processes

• lib/sanitiser_ (to be moved): Sanitiser
• lib/explainer_ (to be moved): Explainer
• tester: Test runner (used for Test)
• sim: Simulator abstraction layer

Top-level

• toplevel: act subcommands
• bin: the act command itself

Design

These pages discuss bits of act's design in detail.

• Overall design: making sense of act's module soup
• Filters: act's usual abstraction for processes that take file input and return file output