Relatively complete pushdown analysis of escape continuations

Abstract

Escape continuations are weaker than full, first-class continuations but nevertheless can express many common control operators. Although language and compiler designs profitably leverage escape continuations, all previous approaches to analyze them statically in a higher-order setting have been ad hoc or imprecise. We present MCCFA2, a generalization of CFA2 that analyzes them with pushdown precision in their most-general form. In particular, the summarization algorithm of MCCFA2 is both sound and complete with respect to a conservative extension of CFA2 ’s abstract semantics. We also present an continuation age analysis as a client of MCCFA2 that reveals critical function call optimizations.