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Streamlining Control Flow Graph Construction with DCFlow

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Book cover Software Language Engineering (SLE 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8706))

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Abstract

A control flow graph (CFG) is used to model possible paths through a program, and is an essential part of many program analysis algorithms. While programs to construct CFGs can be written in meta-programming languages such as Rascal, writing such programs is currently quite tedious. With the goal of streamlining this process, in this paper we present DCFlow, a domain-specific language and Rascal library for defining control flow rules and building control flow graphs. Control flow rules in DCFlow are defined declaratively, based directly on the abstract syntax of the language under analysis and a number of operations representing types of control flow. Standard Rascal code is then generated based on the DCFlow definition. This code makes use of the DCFlow libraries to build CFGs for programs, which can then be visualized or used inside program analysis algorithms. To demonstrate the design of DCFlow we apply it to Pico—a very simple imperative language—and to a significant subset of PHP.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA

    Mark Hills

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  1. Mark Hills
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rennes 1, IRISA, Inria,, France

    Benoît Combemale

  2. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

    David J. Pearce

  3. IRISA, Rennes, France

    Olivier Barais

  4. University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jurgen J. Vinju

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Hills, M. (2014). Streamlining Control Flow Graph Construction with DCFlow. In: Combemale, B., Pearce, D.J., Barais, O., Vinju, J.J. (eds) Software Language Engineering. SLE 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8706. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11245-9_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11245-9_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11244-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11245-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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