Interprocedural type propagation for object-oriented languages (Q1330437)

This paper proposes an efficient method for interprocedural object- oriented type propagation which supports recursion, side-effects and aliasing. It is based on the solution of standard bit-vector data flow problems and a novel form of symbolic interpretation. The general idea consists in building a set of edges for each function, representing these edges as reduction rules that replace a variable occurrence by the join of its reaching definitions, and removing circularities from the resulting system, so that a symbolic expression for any variable occurrence can be obtained by deriving a normal form in a finite number of step. The analysis of the interprocedural propagation algorithm is carried out on symbolic interpretation, on fixed-point computation of graphs for type methods. Author discuss side-effects and aliasing, applicability to type- checking, complexity, applications of the symbolic scheme to other optimization and data flow analysis problems, and comparison with related works.