Mata: A Fast and Simple Finite Automata Library

Mata is a well-engineered automata library written in C++ that offers a unique combination of speed and simplicity. It is meant to serve in applications such as string constraint solving and reasoning about regular expressions, and as a reference implementation of automata algorithms. Besides basic algorithms for (non)deterministic automata, it implements a fast simulation reduction and antichain-based language inclusion checking. The simplicity allows a straightforward access to the low-level structures, making it relatively easy to extend and modify. Besides the C++ API, the library also implements a Python binding. The library comes with a large benchmark of automata problems collected from relevant applications such as string constraint solving, regular model checking, and reasoning about regular expressions. We show that Mata is on this benchmark significantly faster than all libraries from a wide range of automata libraries we collected. Its usefulness in string constraint solving is demonstrated by the string solver Z3-Noodler, which is based on Mata and outperforms the state of the art in string constraint solving on many standard benchmarks.
Tento článek přináší efektivní knihovnu pro práci s konečnými automaty Mata. Mata využívá jednoduché, ale efektivní datové struktury. Rozsáhlé experimentální vyhodnocení ukazuje, že Mata umožňuje rychlejší automatové operace než ostatní knihovny.

Keywords

Nondeterministic finite automata, automata library

Citation

Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 2024, issue 14571, p. 130-151.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-57249-4_7

Document type

Peer-reviewed

Document version

Published version

Language of document

en

Document licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/