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Automatic determination of may/must set usage in data-flow analysis

Date

2009

Authors

Stone, Andrew, author
Strout, Michelle, advisor
Rajopadhye, Sanjay Vishnu, committee member
Liu, Jiangguo, committee member

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Abstract

Data-flow analysis is a common technique for gathering program information for use in performance improving transformations such as register allocation, deadcode elimination, common subexpression elimination, and scheduling. Current tools for generating data-flow analysis implementations enable analysis details to be specified orthogonally to the solution algorithm, but still require implementation details regarding the may and must use and definition sets that occur due to the effects of pointers, side effects, arrays, and user-defined structures. This thesis presents the Data-Flow Analysis Generator tool (DFAGen), which enables analysis writers to generate pointer, aggregate, and side-effect cognizant analyzers for separable and nonseparable data-flow analyses, from a specification that assumes only scalars. By hiding the compiler-specific details behind predefined set definitions, the analysis specifications for the DFAGen tool are typically less than ten lines long and similar to those in standard compiler textbooks. The two main contributions of this work are the automatic determination of when to use the may or must variant of a predefined set reference in the analysis specification, and the design of the analysis specification language so that data-flow problem and compiler framework implementation details are specified orthogonally.

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Department Head: L. Darrell Whitley.

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