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Incremental and Modular Context-sensitive Analysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2021
Abstract
Context-sensitive global analysis of large code bases can be expensive, which can make its use impractical during software development. However, there are many situations in which modifications are small and isolated within a few components, and it is desirable to reuse as much as possible previous analysis results. This has been achieved to date through incremental global analysis fixpoint algorithms that achieve cost reductions at fine levels of granularity, such as changes in program lines. However, these fine-grained techniques are neither directly applicable to modular programs nor are they designed to take advantage of modular structures. This paper describes, implements, and evaluates an algorithm that performs efficient context-sensitive analysis incrementally on modular partitions of programs. The experimental results show that the proposed modular algorithm shows significant improvements, in both time and memory consumption, when compared to existing non-modular, fine-grain incremental analysis techniques. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed intermodular propagation of analysis information, our algorithm also outperforms traditional modular analysis even when analyzing from scratch.
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- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
Research partially funded by MINECO MICINN PID2019-108528RB-C21 ProCode project, FPU grant 16/04811, and the Madrid M141047003 N-GREENS and P2018/TCS-4339 BLOQUES-CM programs. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, editors, and to Ignacio Fábregas for their comments.
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