We present a linear-time algorithm that given a flowgraph G = (V, A, r) and a tree T, checks whether T is the dominator tree of G. Also we prove that there exist two spanning trees of G, T1 and T2, such that for any vertex v the paths from r to v in T1 and T2 intersect only at the vertices that dominate v. The proof is constructive and our algorithm can build the two spanning trees in linear time. Simpler versions of our two algorithms run in O(mα(m, n))time, where n is the number of vertices and m is the number of arcs in G. The existence of such two spanning trees implies that we can order the calculations of the iterative algorithm for finding dominators, proposed by Allen and Cocke [2], so that it builds the dominator tree in a single iteration.

Existing algorithms for computing dominators are formulated for control flow graphs of single procedures. With the rise of computing power, and the viability of whole-program analyses and optimizations, there is a growing need to extend the dominator computation algorithms to context-sensitive interprocedural dominators. Because the transitive reduction of the interprocedural dominator graph is not a tree, as in the intraprocedural case, it is not possible to extend existing algorithms directly. In this article, we propose a new algorithm for computing interprocedural dominators. Although the theoretical complexity of this new algorithm is as high as that of a straightforward iterative solution of the data flow equations, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that the algorithm is practically viable, even for programs consisting of several hundred thousands of basic blocks.

Sharing mutable data (via aliasing) is a powerful programming technique. To facilitate sharing, object-oriented programming languages permit the programmer to selectively break encapsulation boundaries. However, sharing data makes programs harder to understand and reason about, because, unlike encapsulated data, shared data cannot be reasoned about in a modular fashion. This paper presents object control invariants: a set of program properties to help programmers understand and reason about shared data. 1