Compile-time analysis of object-oriented programs

Abstract

Generation of efficient code for object-oriented programs requires knowledge of object lifetimes and method bindings. For object-oriented languages that have automatic storage management and dynamic look-up of methods, the compiler must obtain such knowledge by performing static analysis of the source code. We present an analysis algorithm which discovers the potential classes of each object in an object-oriented program as well as a safe approximation of their lifetimes. These results are obtained using abstract domains that approximate memory configurations and interprocedural call patterns of the program. We present several alternatives for these abstract domains that permit a trade-off between accuracy and complexity of the overall analysis.