Abstract

Programs written in high-level programming languages and in particular object-oriented languages make heavy use of references and dynamically allocated structures. As a result, precise analysis of such features is critical for producing efficient implementations. The information produced by this analysis is invaluable for compiling programs for both sequential and parallel machines. This paper presents a new structure analysis technique handling references and dynamic structures which enables precise analysis of infinite recursive data structures. The precise analysis depends on an enhancement of Chase et al.'s Storage Shape Graph (SSG) called the Abstract Storage Graph (ASG) which extends SSG's with choice nodes, identity paths, and specialized storage nodes and references. These extensions allow ASG's to precisely describe singly- and multiply-linked lists as well as a number of other pointer structures such as octrees, and to analyze programs which manipulate them. We des...

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