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Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Article . 2024 . Peer-reviewed
License: CC BY
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https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/ar...
Article . 2024
License: CC BY
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Article . 2025
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Preprint . 2024
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A Coq Mechanization of JavaScript Regular Expression Semantics

Authors: Noé De Santo; Aurèle Barrière; Clément Pit-Claudel;

A Coq Mechanization of JavaScript Regular Expression Semantics

Abstract

We present an executable, proven-safe, faithful, and future-proof Coq mechanization of JavaScript regular expression (regex) matching, as specified by the latest published edition of ECMA-262 section 22.2. This is, to our knowledge, the first time that an industrial-strength regex language has been faithfully mechanized in an interactive theorem prover. We highlight interesting challenges that arose in the process (including issues of encoding, corner cases, and executability), and we document the steps that we took to ensure that the result is straightforwardly auditable and that our understanding of the specification aligns with existing implementations. We demonstrate the usability and versatility of the mechanization through a broad collection of analyses, case studies, and experiments: we prove that JavaScript regex matching always terminates and is safe (no assertion failures); we identify subtle corner cases that led to mistakes in previous publications; we verify an optimization extracted from a state-of-the-art regex engine; we show that some classic properties described in automata textbooks and used in derivatives-based matchers do not hold in JavaScript regexes; and we demonstrate that the cost of updating the mechanization to account for changes in the original specification is reasonably low. Our mechanization can be extracted to OCaml and JavaScript and linked with Unicode libraries to produce an executable regex engine that passes the relevant parts of the official Test262 conformance test suite.

Keywords

FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Programming Languages, Programming Languages (cs.PL)

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    influence
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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
5
Top 10%
Average
Top 10%
Green
Published in a Diamond OA journal