On the efficient engineering of ambitious program analysis

Recent advances in languages, software design methodologies, and architecture have prompted the development of improved compile-time methods for analyzing the effects of procedure calls, pointer references, and array accesses. Such sophistication, however, generally implies that compilers and programming environments will experience a corresponding increase in the volume of analysis information, which may be difficult to use efficiently. In this paper, we consider the practical accommodation of such information. Our results show how to engineer a compiler such that its optimization phase takes time proportional to the benefit, rather than the size, of such information.< >