Practical Research Projects - Project Description

Project Description

This is a description of a Practical Research Project associated with the PREP course

Project Title

Control-Flow Analysis with Reachability

Quarter

Q1 or Q2 2010

Responsible

Jan Midtgaard.

Aims

The aim of this project is to experiment with reachability based control-flow analysis (CFA) in MLton - a wholeprogram compiler for SML. As a first step the student will incorporate reachability in the existing CFA implementation in MLton, and as a second step experiment with dead-code elimination based on the extension. Ultimately we aim to reduce the size of the resulting binaries produced by the compiler.

Learning Outcome

The student will learn

to implement control-flow analyses
to extend and improve an industrial-strength compiler
to apply static analysis research

Requirements

Programming languages, dOvs, static analysis and/or abstract interpretation.