[abc] Dataflow analysis

Hi all.

I have just had a meeting with Laurie and we discussed my plans for my
thesis. So my long term goal is to provide a verification tool that uses
something like the existing implementations of tracematches and/or J-LO
as a backend, and then some (probably domain specific) high level
formalisms which allow users to specify real life properties about their
applications. The point is that the implementation should be fast. In
fact I want to try as much as I can to speed up things both trough
static analysis and through faster code for the runtime instrumentation.

Topic 1 is going to be a static dataflow analysis as it was proposed by
Ondrej for the ECOOP/OOPSLA paper. So - as a coursework for Laurie's
compiler course - I would like to implement such an analysis in order to
speed up both, tracematches and J-LO. In fact I think the very same
analysis should apply to both tools - actually they should even apply to
any other approach in the field such as PQL, HAWK etc... Based on this
implementation we could then certainly try to publish something about
it. (Here we could in particular try to find out if this is also
applicable to context free stuff - which I actually think should be the
case.)

So my question at the moment is just who of you would be interested in
getting involved with this, i.e. right now contribute some ideas, take
some time to think about the necessary analysis, probably cases which
might break those and so forth. Any volunteers?

And probably I should mention that on the field of verification, I think
such an analysis would be a great contribution because it would in
combination with our tools lead to something very similar to Model
Checking, which has hardly ever been done (and never very efficiently
AFAIK) for full Java.

Eric

--
Eric Bodden
Sable Research Group, McGill University
Montreal, Canada