How to uniformly specify program analysis and transformation with graph rewrite systems

Abstract

Implementing program optimizers is a task which swallows an enourmous amount of man-power. To reduce development time a simple and practial specification method is highly desirable. Such a method should comprise both program analysis and transformation. However, although several frameworks for program analysis exist, none of them can be used for analysis and transformation uniformly. This paper presents such a method. For program analysis we use a simple variant of graph rewrite systems (edge addition rewrite systems). for program transformation we apply more complex graph rewrite systems. Our specification method has been implemented prototypically in the optimizer generator OPTIMIX. OPTIMIX works with arbitrary intermediate languages and generates real-life program analyses and transformations. We demonstrate this by several examples and measurements.