Practical Techniques For Virtual Call Resolution In Java

Abstract

Virtual method calls are a fundamental feature offered by Java, an object-oriented programming language. However, they are also a source of degradation of performance at run time and imprecision in interprocedural analyses. There are several well known, inexpensive analyses that have been developed for virtual call resolution. However, they have been observed to be effective in resolving method calls in library code, while not being very effective in the benchmark code excluding libraries. We present a new flow insensitive and context insensitive analysis called reaching type analysis in this thesis. We present the analysis rules for two variations of this analysis, variable type analysis and a coarser grained version declared type analysis. Reaching type analysis is based on an analysis that builds a type propagation graph where nodes represent variables and edges represent the flow of types due to assignments. We have implemented variable type analysis and declared type analysis, and tw..