A new method for program inversion

Abstract

Program inversion has been successfully applied to several areas such as optimistic parallel discrete event simulation (OPDES) and reverse debugging. This paper introduces a new program inversion algorithm for imperative languages, and focuses on handling arbitrary control flows and basic operations. By building a value search graph that represents recoverability relationships between variable values, we turn the problem of recovering previous values into a graph search one. Forward and reverse code is generated according to the search results. We have implemented our algorithm as part of a compiler framework named Backstroke, a C++ source-to-source translator based on ROSE compiler. Backstroke targets optimistic simulation codes and automatically generates a reverse function to recover values modified by a target function. Experimental results show that our method is effective and produces better performance than previously proposed methods. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.