A Generic Framework for the Cost Analysis of Java Bytecode∗

Cost analysis of Java bytecode is complicated by its unstructured control flow, the use of an operand stack and its object-oriented pro-gramming features (like dynamic dispatching). This paper addresses these problems and de-velops 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 func-tion of their input data size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to the au-tomatic cost analysis of Java bytecode.