Cost analysis of java bytecode

Abstract. Cost analysis of Java bytecode is complicated by its unstruc-tured control flow, the use of an operand stack and its object-oriented programming features (like dynamic dispatching). This paper addresses these problems and develops a generic framework for the automatic cost analysis of sequential Java bytecode. Our method generates cost relations which define at compile-time the cost of programs as a function of their input data size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to the automatic cost analysis of Java bytecode.