A Study of Dead Data Members in C++ Applications

Object-oriented applications may contain data members that can be removed from the application without a ecting program behavior. Such \dead" data members may occur due to unused functionality in class libraries, or due to the programmer losing track of member usage as the application changes over time. We present a simple and e cient algorithm for detecting dead data members in C++ applications. This algorithm has been implemented using a prototype version of the IBM VisualAge C++ compiler, and applied to a number of realistic benchmark programs ranging from 600 to 58,000 lines of code. For the non-trivial benchmarks, we found that up to 27.3% of the data members in the bench

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Peter F. Sweeney, Frank Tip
• Keywords: Data Members, Dead Data Members, PLDI 1998, Programmer Losing Track, Programming Languages