Pushdown control-flow analysis for free

Traditional control-flow analysis (CFA) for higher-order languages introduces spurious connections between callers and callees, and different invocations of a function may pollute each other’s return flows. Recently, three distinct approaches have been published that provide perfect call-stack precision in a computable manner: CFA2, PDCFA, and AAC. Unfortunately, implementing CFA2 and PDCFA requires significant engineering effort. Furthermore, all three are computationally expensive. For a monovariant analysis, CFA2 is in O(2n ), PDCFA is in O(n6 ), and AAC is in O(n8 ). In this paper, we describe a new technique that builds on these but is both straightforward to implement and computationally inexpensive. The crucial insight is an unusual state-dependent allocation strategy for the addresses of continuations. Our technique imposes only a constant-factor overhead on the underlying analysis and costs only O(n3 ) in the monovariant case. We present the intuitions behind this develo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Thomas Gilray, Steven Lyde, Michael D. Adams 0001, Matthew Might, David Van Horn
• Keywords: POPL 2016, Programming Languages