Compile-Time Analysis on Programs with Dynamic Pointer-Linked Data Structures

Abstract

This paper studies static analysis on programs that create and traverse dynamic pointer-linked data structures. It introduces a new type of auxiliary structures, called {\em link graphs}, to depict the alias information of pointers and connection relationships of dynamic pointer-linked data structures. The link graphs can be used by compilers to detect side effects, to identify the patterns of traversal, and to gather the DEF-USE information of dynamic pointer-linked data structures. The results of the above compile-time analysis are essential for parallelization and optimizations on communication and synchronization overheads. Algorithms that perform compile-time analysis on side effects and DEF-USE information using link graphs will be proposed.