[PRL] Torture Chamber WVH166 14:00 Tuesday June 26

[J. Ian Johnson]

I'll be giving a practice talk for the IBM PL day this coming Thursday. The slot is for 25 minutes, so a 20 minute talk.
Please come and torture me!

--
J. Ian Johnson  
Designing Precise Pushdown Higher-Order Flow Analyses

Formalisms for context-free approaches to higher-order control-flow 
analysis are complex and require significant effort to prove correct. 
However, these approaches are enticing because they provide improved 
precision over finite state approaches. We present a new method for 
deriving context-free analyses that results in "obviously correct"
formalisms that consists of making small changes to the original concrete 
semantics. We validate this method by using it to derive existing 
context-free analyses from abstract machines. We further exercise the 
technique by applying it to abstract machines that more closely represent 
real language implementations and consequently derive analyses more 
precise than existing ones. Specifically, we use an escape analysis to 
derive better stack allocation, and use garbage collection to derive 
better heap allocation. We also present a novel semantics for call/cc 
that, when turned into an analysis, handles non-escaping continuations 
more precisely than prior treatments of first-class control.