A Sound Static Analysis Approach to I/O API Migration
Shangyu Li, Zhaoyang Zhang, Sizhe Zhong, Diyu Zhou, and Jiasi Shen
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. Oct 2025
The advances in modern storage technologies necessitate the development of new input/output (I/O) APIs to maximize their performance benefits. However, migrating existing software to use different APIs poses significant challenges due to mismatches in computational models and complex code structures surrounding stateful, non-contiguous multi-API call sites. We present Sprout, a new system for automatically migrating programs across I/O APIs that guarantees behavioral equivalence. Sprout uses flow-sensitive pointer analysis to identify semantic variables, which enables the typestate analysis for matching API semantics and the synthesis of migrated programs. Experimental results with real-world C programs highlight the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. We also show that Sprout can be adapted to other domains, such as databases.