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JavaSMT

JavaSMT is a common API layer for accessing various SMT solvers. The API is optimized for performance (using JavaSMT has very little runtime overhead compared to using the solver API directly), customizability (features and settings exposed by various solvers should be visible through the wrapping layer) and type-safety (it shouldn't be possible to add boolean terms to integer ones at compile time) sometimes at the cost of verbosity.

Quick links

Getting Started | Documentation | Known Issues | Documentation for Developers | Changelog | Configuration Options

References

• D. Baier, D. Beyer, and K. Friedberger. JavaSMT 3: Interacting with SMT Solvers in Java. In Proc. CAV, LNCS 12760, pages 1-13, 2021. Springer.
• E. G. Karpenkov, K. Friedberger, and D. Beyer. JavaSMT: A Unified Interface for SMT Solvers in Java. In Proc. VSTTE, LNCS 9971, pages 139–148, 2016. Springer.

Feature overview

JavaSMT can express formulas in the following theories:

• Integer
• Rational
• Bitvector
• Floating Point
• Array
• Uninterpreted Function
• String and RegEx

The concrete support for a certain theory depends on the underlying SMT solver. Only a few SMT solvers provide support for theories like Arrays, Floating Point, String or RegEx.

Currently JavaSMT supports several SMT solvers (see Getting Started for installation):

We support a reasonable list of operating systems and versions. Our main target is Linux (64-bit, mainly Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, several solver libraries also work on Ubuntu 18.04, or comparable Linux distributions). Windows 10/11 and MacOS are supported for several SMT solvers (with limited hardware for testing). If a specific operating system is missing and required, please do not hesitate and open an issue!

The following features are supported (depending on the used SMT solver):

• Satisfiability checking
• Quantifiers and quantifier elimination
• Incremental solving with assumptions
• Incremental solving with push/pop
• Multiple independent contexts
• Model generation
• Interpolation, including tree and sequential structure
• Formula transformation using built-in tactics
• Formula introspection using visitors

We aim for supporting more important features, more SMT solvers, and more systems. If something specific is missing, please look for or file an issue.

Multithreading Support

Interruption using a ShutdownNotifier may be used to interrupt a solver from any thread. Formulas are translatable in between contexts/provers/threads using FormulaManager.translateFrom().

¹ Multiple contexts, but all operations on each context only from a single thread. ² Multiple provers on one or more contexts, with each prover using its own thread.

Garbage Collection in Native Solvers

JavaSMT exposes an API for performing garbage collection on solvers implemented in a native language. As a native solver has no way of knowing whether the created formula object is still referenced by the client application, this API is necessary to avoid leaking memory. Note that several solvers already support hash consing and thus, there is never more than one copy of an identical formula object in memory. Consequently, if all created formulas are later re-used (or re-created) in the application, it is not necessary to perform any garbage collection at all. Additionally, the memory for formulas created on user-side (i.e., via JavaSMT) is negligible compared to solver-internal memory-consumption when solving a hard SMT query.

• Z3: The parameter solver.z3.usePhantomReferences may be used to control whether JavaSMT will attempt to decrease references on Z3 formula objects once they are no longer referenced.
• MathSAT5: Currently we do not support performing garbage collection for MathSAT5.
• CVC4, CVC5, Bitwuzla: Solvers using SWIG bindings do perform garbage collection.
• Other native SMT solvers: we do not perform garbage collection.

Getting started

Installation is possible via Maven, Ivy, or manually. Please see our Getting Started Guide.

Usage

// Instantiate JavaSMT with SMTInterpol as backend (for dependencies cf. documentation)
try (SolverContext context = SolverContextFactory.createSolverContext(
        config, logger, shutdownNotifier, Solvers.SMTINTERPOL)) {
  IntegerFormulaManager imgr = context.getFormulaManager().getIntegerFormulaManager();

  // Create formula "a = b" with two integer variables
  IntegerFormula a = imgr.makeVariable("a");
  IntegerFormula b = imgr.makeVariable("b");
  BooleanFormula f = imgr.equal(a, b);

  // Solve formula, get model, and print variable assignment
  try (ProverEnvironment prover = context.newProverEnvironment(ProverOptions.GENERATE_MODELS)) {
    prover.addConstraint(f);
    boolean isUnsat = prover.isUnsat();
    assert !isUnsat;
    try (Model model = prover.getModel()) {
      System.out.printf("SAT with a = %s, b = %s", model.evaluate(a), model.evaluate(b));
    }
  }
}

Authors

• Project maintainers: Karlheinz Friedberger and Philipp Wendler
• Former project maintainer: George Karpenkov
• Initial codebase, many design decisions: Philipp Wendler
• Contributions: Daniel Baier, Thomas Stieglmaier and several others.