[PRL] ESOP practice talk

[Dimitris Vardoulakis]

Hi all,

I'm going to give a torture-chamber talk for my ESOP paper titled
"CFA2: a Context-Free Approach to Control-Flow Analysis" on Thursday,
March 18 at 1.30 pm in WVH 164. If you can come and give feedback I'd
greatly appreciate it.


Abstract:

In a functional language, the dominant control-flow mechanism is
function call and return. Most higher-order flow analyses, including k
-CFA, do not handle call and return well: they remember only a bounded
number of pending calls because they approximate programs with
control-flow graphs. Call/return mismatch introduces
precision-degrading spurious control-flow paths and increases the
analysis time.

We describe CFA2, the first flow analysis with precise call/return
matching in the presence of higher-order functions and tail calls. We
formulate CFA2 as an abstract interpretation of programs in
continuation-passing style and describe a sound and complete
summarization algorithm for our abstract semantics. A preliminary
evaluation shows that CFA2 gives
more accurate data-flow information than 0CFA and 1CFA.


-- 
Dimitris