Global Flow Analysis as a Practical Compilation Tool

This paper addresses the issue of the practicality of global ow analysis in logic program compilation, in terms of speed of the analysis, precision, and usefulness of the information obtained. To this end, design and implementation aspects are discussed for two practical abstract interpretation-based ow analysis systems: MA 3, the MCC And-parallel Analyzer and Annotator; and Ms, an experimental mode inference system developed for SB-Prolog. The paper also provides performance data obtained from these implementations and, as an example of an application, a study of the usefulness of the mode information obtained in reducing run-time checks in independent and-parallelism. Based on the results obtained, it is concluded that the overhead of global ow analysis is not prohibitive, while the results of analysis can be quite precise and useful