Mostly-Functional Behavior in Java Programs

Benton, William C.; Fischer, Charles N.

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-93900-9_7

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…The results in this paper show that, despite previous experience suggesting otherwise [12,7], strong updates and the associated machinery are not critical in practice, and that weak updates are sufficient for computing large amounts of useful shape and sharing information in real world object-oriented programs. This conclusion is reached via experimental evaluation with the heap analysis constructed in this paper, Structural Analysis, and an analysis of other recent empirical research [2,1,41,3,5]. Thus, this work opens new possibilities for exploring the relationships between shape and points-to analyses and represents a new approach to building scalable and precise memory analysis tools.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

“…Recent empirical work on the structure and behavior of the heap in modern objectoriented programs has shed light on how heap structures are constructed [41,3], the configuration of the pointers and objects in them [5], and their invariant structural properties [31,2,1]. These results affirm several common assumptions about how object-oriented programs are designed and how the heap structures in them behave.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

“…These results affirm several common assumptions about how object-oriented programs are designed and how the heap structures in them behave. In particular [41,3,5] demonstrate that object-oriented programs exhibit extensive mostly-functional behaviors: making extensive use of final (or quiescing) fields, stationary fields, copy construction, and when fields are updated the new target is frequently a newer (often freshly allocated) object. The results in [31,2,1] provide insight into what heuristics can be used to effectively group sections of the heap based on how they are used in the program, how prevalent the use of library containers is, and what sorts structures are built.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Structural Analysis: Shape Information via Points-To Computation

Marron¹

2012

Preprint

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This paper introduces a new hybrid memory analysis, Structural Analysis, which combines an expressive shape analysis style abstract domain with efficient and simple points-to style transfer functions. Using data from empirical studies on the runtime heap structures and the programmatic idioms used in modern object-oriented languages we construct a heap analysis with the following characteristics: (1) it can express a rich set of structural, shape, and sharing properties which are not provided by a classic points-to analysis and that are useful for optimization and error detection applications (2) it uses efficient, weakly-updating, set-based transfer functions which enable the analysis to be more robust and scalable than a shape analysis and (3) it can be used as the basis for a scalable interprocedural analysis that produces precise results in practice. The analysis has been implemented for .Net bytecode and using this implementation we evaluate both the runtime cost and the precision of the results on a number of well known benchmarks and real world programs. Our experimental evaluations show that the domain defined in this paper is capable of precisely expressing the majority of the connectivity, shape, and sharing properties that occur in practice and, despite the use of weak updates, the static analysis is able to precisely approximate the ideal results. The analysis is capable of analyzing large real-world programs (over 30K bytecodes) in less than 65 seconds and using less than 130 MB of memory. In summary his work presents a new type of memory analysis that advances the state of the art with respect to expressive power, precision, and scalability and represents a new area of study on the relationships between and combination of concepts from shape and points-to analyses.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 60%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Structural Analysis: Shape Information via Points-To Computation

Marron¹

2012

Preprint

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“…writes to object state during construction) and quiesing fields (i.e. fields which are never written after construction) [2]. Their approach is parameterised on the pointer analysis algorithm.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

JPure: A Modular Purity System for Java

Pearce

2011

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Purity Analysis is the problem of determining whether or not a method may have side-effects. This has applications in automatic parallelisation, extended static checking, and more. We present a novel purity system for Java that employs purity annotations which can be checked modularly. This is done using a flow-sensitive, intraprocedural analysis. The system exploits two properties, called freshness and locality, to increase the range of methods that can be considered pure. JPure also includes an inference engine for annotating legacy code. We evaluate our system against several packages from the Java Standard Library. Our results indicate it is possible to uncover significant amounts of purity efficiently.

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