IncA

A DSL for the Definition of Incremental Program Analyses

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

T. Szabo Itemis AG, Programming Languages - EEMCS
S.T. Erdweg Programming Languages - EEMCS
Markus Voelter Itemis AG
Research Group
Programming Languages (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Static Analysis Language Workbench Domain-specific language Incremental Computation
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Published Date

2016-9

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Programming Languages

Abstract

Program analyses support software developers, for example, through error detection, code-quality assurance, and by enabling compiler optimizations and refactorings. To provide real-time feedback to developers within IDEs, an analysis must run efficiently even if the analyzed code base is large.

To achieve this goal, we present a domain-specific language called IncA for the definition of efficient incremental program analyses that update their result as the program changes. IncA compiles analyses into graph patterns and relies on existing incremental matching algorithms. To scale IncA analyses to large programs, we describe optimizations that reduce caching and prune change propagation. Using IncA, we have developed incremental control flow and points-to analysis for C, well-formedness checks for DSLs, and 10 FindBugs checks for Java. Our evaluation demonstrates significant speedups for all analyses compared to their non-incremental counterparts.