A Framework for Selective Recompilation in the Presence of Complex Intermodule Dependencies

Compilers and other programming environment tools derive information from the source code of programs; derived information includes compiled code, interprocedural summary information, and call graph views. If the source program changes, the derived information needs to be updated. We present a simple framework for maintaining intermodule dependencies, embodying different tradeoffs in terms of space usage, speed of processing, and selectivity of invalidation, that eases the implementation of incremental update of derived information. Our framework augments a directed acyclic graph representation of dependencies with factoring nodes (to save space) and filtering nodes (to increase selectivity), and it includes an algorithm for efficient invalidation processing. We show how several schemes for selective recompilation, such as smart recompilation, filter sets for interprocedural summary information, and dependencies for whole-program optimization of object-oriented languages, map naturally onto our framework. For this latter application, by exploiting the facilities of our framework, we are able to reduce the number of lines of source code recompiled by a factor of seven over a header file-based scheme, and by a factor of two over the previous state-of-the-art selective dependency mechanism without consuming additional space.