Towards a tool kit for the automatic generation of interprocedural data flow analyses

Frameworks for interprocedural data ow analysis (DFA) often have a foundational character: designing concrete applications requires usually a deep understanding of the framework. Here, we reconsider interprocedural DFA from an application-oriented point of view, where all details irrelevant for application are hidden. In this view the underlying framework, which captures programs with mutually recursive procedures, global and local variables, formal value and reference parameters, reduces to a cook book of (1) how to specify interprocedural DFAs and (2) how to prove them precise with respect to a program property of interest. Thus only knowledge about the speciication level is required. Moreover, this presentation also yields the basis for a tool kit implementation: speciication parameters and generic algorithms of the framework become speciication tools allowing concise speciications and computation tools processing them. A tool kit prototype has been implemented within MetaFrame, a programming environment for the construction and veriication of complex software systems. The beneets of the approach are demonstrated by a collection of practically relevant precise interprocedural DFAs ranging from classical bit-vector problems like available expressions and live variables to sophisticated and powerful optimizations like the optimal elimination of interprocedural partial redundancies. 1. Motivation Data ow analysis (DFA) is concerned with the static analysis of objects like programs, systems, or programming environments in order to support applications like system reengi-neering, program validation or the construction of optimizing compilers. We focus on the generation of eecient code by optimizing compilers in this article, the classical application of DFA. In this context, designers of a DFA are typically faced with the problem of how to construct an algorithm that determines the set of program points of an argument program which satisfy a certain property of interest. Though this problem has been studied in detail for the intraprocedural case, the construction of interprocedural analyses is still 2 Part of the work was done while the author was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft grant La 426/11-1. 2 Jens Knoop et al. characterized by heuristics and ad-hoc techniques. Moreover, frameworks for interproce-dural DFA often have a foundational character: designing concrete applications requires usually a deep understanding of the framework. The point of this paper is to reconsider interprocedural DFA in a cook book view, where all details irrelevant for application are hidden in order to support the designer of a DFA by structuring and simplifying the construction of provably correct and precise interprocedu-ral DFA-algorithms. The …