Abstract

Program development, debugging, and maintenance can be greatly improved by the use of software tools that provide information about program behavior. This thesis focuses on a number of useful software tools and shows how their efficiency, generality, and precision can be increased through the use of control-flow and control dependence analysis. We consider two classes of tools: execution measurement tools, which collect information about a particular program execution; and program analysis tools, which provide information about potential program behavior by statically analyzing the program. We consider three tools that measure aspects of a program's execution: profiling, tracing, and event counting tools. We describe algorithms for profiling and tracing programs that use a combination of control-flow analysis and program instrumentation to produce exact profiles and traces with low run-time overhead. Rather than record information at every point in a program, the algorithms record info...

Citations