Interprocedural Side-Effect Analysis in Linear Time

Abstract

We present a new method for solving Banning's alias-free flow-insensitive side-effect analysis problem. The algorithm employs a new data structure, called the binding multi-graph, along with depth-first search to achieve a running time that is linear in the size of the call multi-graph of the program. This method can be extended to produce fast algorithms for data-flow problems with more complex lattice structures.