Enhanced sharing analysis techniques: a comprehensive evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Roberto Bagnara;Enea Zaffanella;Patricia M. Hill

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Parma, Italy (e-mail: bagnara@cs.unipr.it, zaffanella@cs.unipr.it);Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Parma, Italy (e-mail: bagnara@cs.unipr.it, zaffanella@cs.unipr.it);School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK (e-mail: hill@comp.leeds.ac.uk)

  • Venue:
  • Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

$\textup{\textsf{Sharing}}$, an abstract domain developed by D. Jacobs and A. Langen for the analysis of logic programs, derives useful aliasing information. It is well-known that a commonly used core of techniques, such as the integration of $\textup{\textsf{Sharing}}$ with freeness and linearity information, can significantly improve the precision of the analysis. However, a number of other proposals for refined domain combinations have been circulating for years. One feature that is common to these proposals is that they do not seem to have undergone a thorough experimental evaluation even with respect to the expected precision gains. In this paper we experimentally evaluate: helping $\textup{\textsf{Sharing}}$ with the definitely ground variables found using $\textit{Pos}$, the domain of positive Boolean formulas; the incorporation of explicit structural information; a full implementation of the reduced product of $\textup{\textsf{Sharing}}$ and $\textit{Pos}$; the issue of reordering the bindings in the computation of the abstract $\mgu$; an original proposal for the addition of a new mode recording the set of variables that are deemed to be ground or free; a refined way of using linearity to improve the analysis; the recovery of hidden information in the combination of $\textup{\textsf{Sharing}}$ with freeness information. Finally, we discuss the issue of whether tracking compoundness allows the computation of more sharing information.