Cost analysis of object-oriented bytecode programs

Cost analysis statically approximates the cost of programs in terms of their inputdata size. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach tothe automatic cost analysis of Object-Oriented bytecode programs. In languagessuch as Java and C#, analyzing bytecode has a much wider application areathan analyzing source code since the latter is often not available. Cost analysisin this context has to consider, among others, dynamic dispatch, jumps, theoperand stack, and the heap. Our method takes a bytecode program and a costmodel specifying the resource of interest, and generates cost relations whichapproximate the execution cost of the program with respect to such resource.We report on COSTA, an implementation for Java bytecode which can obtainupper bounds on cost for a large class of programs and complexity classes. Ourbasic techniques can be directly applied to infer cost relations for other Object-Oriented imperative languages, not necessarily in bytecode form.