Declarative Intraprocedural Flow Analysis of Java Source Code

The authors have implemented intraprocedural control-flow and data-flow analysis of Java source code in a declarative manner, using reference attribute grammars augmented with circular attributes and collection attributes. The implementation is built on top of the JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler and the authors have run the analyses on medium-sized Java programs. This paper shows how the analyses can be built using small concise composable modules, and how they provide extensible frameworks for further source code analyses. Preliminary measurements indicate that there is little difference in execution time between the declarative data-flow analysis and an imperative implementation.