Call graph construction in object-oriented languages

  • Authors:

  • David Grove;Greg DeFouw;Jeffrey Dean;Craig Chambers

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle, Washington;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle, Washington;Digital Equipment Corporation, Western Research Lab, 250 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle, Washing ...;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Box 352350, Seattle, Washington

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Interprocedural analyses enable optimizing compilers to more precisely model the effects of non-inlined procedure calls, potentially resulting in substantial increases in application performance. Applying interprocedural analysis to programs written in object-oriented or functional languages is complicated by the difficulty of constructing an accurate program call graph. This paper presents a parameterized algorithmic framework for call graph construction in the presence of message sends and/or first class functions. We use this framework to describe and to implement a number of well-known and new algorithms. We then empirically assess these algorithms by applying them to a suite of medium-sized programs written in Cecil and Java, reporting on the relative cost of the analyses, the relative precision of the constructed call graphs, and the impact of this precision on the effectiveness of a number of interprocedural optimizations.