Experimental Evaluation of a Generic Abstract Interpretation Algorithm for PROLOG

Abstract

Interpretation of PROLOG programs has attracted many researchers in recent years, partly because of the potential for optimization in PROLOG compilers and partly because of the declarative nature of logic programming languages that make them more amenable to optimization than procedural languages. Most of the work, however, has remained at the theoretical level, focusing on the developments of frameworks and the definition of abstract domains. This paper reports our effort to verify experimentally the practical value of this area of research. It describes the design and implementation of the generic abstract interpretation algorithm GAIA that we originally proposed in Le Charlier et al. [1991], its instantiation to a sophisticated abstract domain 1994 containing modes, types, sharing, and aliasing, and its evaluation both in terms of performance and accuracy. The overall implementation (over 5000 lines of Pascal) has been systematically analyzed on a variety of programs and compared with the complexity analysis of Le Charlie et al. [1991] and the specific analysis systems of Hickey and Mudambi [1989], Taylor [1989; 1990], Van Roy and Despain [1990], and Warren et al. [1988]. © 1994, ACM. All rights reserved.