Re: Interprocedural Dataflow Analysis - Scalability issues

[Daniel Berlin <dberlin at dberlin dot org>]

On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 15:36 +0530, Virender Kashyap wrote:
> Hi,
>     I am working on interprocedural data flow analysis(IPDFA) and need some 
> feedback on scalability issues in IPDFA. Firstly since one file is 
> compiled at a time, we can do IPDFA only within a file. 

For starters, we're working on this.

> But that would 
> prevent us from doing analysis for funcitons which are called in file 
> A , 
> but are defined in some other file B. 



You just have to make conservative assumptions, of course.

You almost *never* have the whole program at once, except in
benchmarks :)

> So even if we do any analysis it 
> would give limited advantage.

This isn't necessarily true, it depends on the analysis.

>  Morever even if we are able to store 
> information of  large number of functions, it would cost heavily in 
> memory, and threfore non scalable.

Uh, not necessarily.
It depends on what you are storing.

>          So, to what extent can IPDFA be advantageous ?  Or, are there 
> solutions to above problems ?

Yes, summaries, conservative assumptions about functions we can't see,
etc.


> 
> Regards,
> 
> Virender.
> 
>