• Summary
• Related Documents
  • Active Bibliography
  • Co-citation
• Version History

Abstract:

Reaching-definitions analysis (RDA), i.e., computing the use sites of the left-hand sides of assignments, is a classical data-flow analysis (DFA) problem. For scalar variables, classical DFA provides a quite satisfying solution. It is simple, efficient, precise, automatically generable, and interprocedurally extensible without sacrificing any of the former properties. However, the level of granularity the RD-problem is investigated on is too coarse for many practically relevant applications, in particular, automatic parallelization. This led to the development of a broad variety of approaches designed under different basic assumptions for different settings, and enjoying quite different characteristics. This paper aims at providing the first systematic stocktaking of the state-of-the-art approaches of the field with a focus on identifying and highlighting their strengths and limitations. The benefits of this approach are two-fold. Highlighting the strengths of current approaches assists practitioners in choosing the most appropriate approaches for specific application profiles. Highlighting the limitations and common short-comings of current approaches directs researchers to important issues of future work. And last but not least, it contributes to bridging the gap between communities working (too often) independently on these issues. Keywords: Reaching-definitions (statement-wise, instance-wise), static analysis, data-flow

Citations