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A Refinement of the Escape Property

Patricia M. Hill
School of Computing
The University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
England

Fausto Spoto
Dipartimento Scientifico e Tecnologico
Strada Le Grazie
15 Ca' Vignal
37134 Verona
Italy

Abstract:

Escape analysis of object-oriented languages determines, for every program point, the escape property E i.e., the set of the creation points of the objects reachable from some variables. An approximation of E is useful to stack allocate dynamically created objects and to reduce the overhead of synchronisation in Java-like languages. E can itself be used for escape analysis, but it is very imprecise. We define here a refinement ER of E, in the sense that ER is more concrete than E and, hence, leads to a more precise escape analysis than E.

Keywords: Semantics, static analysis, abstract interpretation, debugging.