A Flexible Architecture for Building Data Flow

Data ow analysis is a versatile technique that can be used to address a variety of analysis problems. Typically , data ow analyzers are hand-crafted to solve a particular analysis problem. The cost of constructing analyzers can be high and is a barrier to evaluating alternative analyzer designs. In this paper, we describe an architecture that facilitates the rapid prototyping of data ow analyzers. With this architecture, a developer chooses from a collection of pre-existing components or, using high-level component generators, constructs new components and combines them to produce a data ow analyzer. In addition to support for traditional data ow analysis problems, this architecture supports the development of analyzers for a class of combined data ow problems that ooer increased precision. This architecture allows developers to investigate quickly and easily a wide variety of analyzer design alternatives and to understand the practical design tradeoos better. We describe our experience using this architecture to construct a variety of diierent data ow analyzers. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE.