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On the sequential nature of interprocedural program-analysis problems

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Abstract

In this paper, we study two interprocedural program-analysis problems—interprocedural slicing and interprocedural dataflow analysis— and present the following results:

  • • Interprocedural slicing is log-space complete forP.

  • • The problem of obtaining “meet-over-all-valid-paths” solutions to interprocedural versions of distributive dataflow-analysis problems isP-hard.

  • • Obtaining “meet-over-all-valid-paths” solutions to interprocedural versions of distributive dataflow-analysis problems that involve finite sets of dataflow facts (such as the classical “gen/kill” problems) is log-space complete forP.

These results provide evidence that there do not exist fast (Nℐ-class) parallel algorithms for interprocedural slicing and precise interprocedural dataflow analysis (unlessP =Nℐ). That is, it is unlikely that there are algorithms for interprocedural slicing and precise interprocedural dataflow analysis for which the number of processors is bounded by a polynomial in the size of the input, and whose running time is bounded by a polynomial in the logarithm of the size of the input. This suggests that there are limitations on the ability to use parallelism to overcome compiler bottlenecks due to expensive interprocedural-analysis computations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1210 W. Dayton Street, WI 53706, Madison, USA

    Thomas Reps

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Correspondence to Thomas Reps.

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Work performed at the Datalogisk Institut, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. This work was supported in part by a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-9100424, and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under ARPA Order No. 8856 (monitored by the Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-92-J-1937).

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Reps, T. On the sequential nature of interprocedural program-analysis problems. Acta Informatica 33, 739–757 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03036473

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