Region analysis and transformation for Java programs

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a region analysis and transformation framework for Java programs. Given an input Java program, the compiler automatically translates it into an equivalent output program with region-based memory management. The generated program contains statements for creating regions, allocating objects in regions, removing regions, and passing regions as parameters. As a particular case, the analysis can enable the allocation of objects on the stack.

Our algorithm uses a flow-insensitive and context-sensitive points-to analysis to partition the memory of the program into regions and to identify points-to relations between regions. It then performs a flow-sensitive, inter-procedural region liveness analysis to identify object lifetimes. Finally, it uses the computed region information to produce the region annotations in the output program. Our results indicate that, for several of our benchmarks, the transformation can allocate most of the data on stack or in short-lived regions, and can yield substantial memory savings.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alexander Aiken , Manuel Fähndrich , Raph Levien, Better static memory management: improving region-based analysis of higher-order languages, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1995 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.174-185, June 18-21, 1995, La Jolla, California, United States
• 2: Lars Birkedal , Mads Tofte , Magnus Vejlstrup, From region inference to von Neumann machines via region representation inference, Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.171-183, January 21-24, 1996, St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/237721.237771]
• 3: Bruno Blanchet, Escape analysis for object-oriented languages: application to Java, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.20-34, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 4: Jeff Bogda , Urs Hölzle, Removing unnecessary synchronization in Java, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.35-46, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 5: James Gosling , Greg Bollella, The Real-Time Specification for Java, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
• 6: Chandrasekhar Boyapati , Alexandru Salcianu , William Beebee, Jr. , Martin Rinard, Ownership types for safe region-based memory management in real-time Java, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 09-11, 2003, San Diego, California, USA
• 7: Brendon Cahoon. The Java Olden benchmarks. "www-ali.cs.umass.edu/~cahoon/olden".
• 8: Wei-Ngan Chin , Florin Craciun , Shengchao Qin , Martin Rinard, Region inference for an object-oriented language, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2004 conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 09-11, 2004, Washington DC, USA
• 9: Jong-Deok Choi , Manish Gupta , Mauricio Serrano , Vugranam C. Sreedhar , Sam Midkiff, Escape analysis for Java, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.1-19, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 10: M. Christiansen and P. Velschow. Region-based memory management in Java. Master's thesis, DIKU, University of Copenhagen, May 1998.
• 11: Morgan Deters , Ron K. Cytron, Automated discovery of scoped memory regions for real-time Java, Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on Memory management, June 20-21, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 12: David Gay , Alex Aiken, Memory management with explicit regions, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1998 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.313-323, June 17-19, 1998, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• 13: David Gay , Alex Aiken, Language support for regions, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation, p.70-80, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
• 14: David Gay , Bjarne Steensgaard, Fast Escape Analysis and Stack Allocation for Object-Based Programs, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Compiler Construction, p.82-93, March 25-April 02, 2000
• 15: Dan Grossman , Greg Morrisett , Trevor Jim , Michael Hicks , Yanling Wang , James Cheney, Region-based memory management in cyclone, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming language design and implementation, June 17-19, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 16: Fritz Henglein , Henning Makholm , Henning Niss, A direct approach to control-flow sensitive region-based memory management, Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Principles and practice of declarative programming, p.175-186, September 05-07, 2001, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/773184.773203]
• 17: Chris Lattner , Vikram Adve, Automatic pool allocation for disjoint data structures, Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Memory system performance, p.13-24, June 16-16, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 18: Donglin Liang , Mary Jean Harrold, Efficient points-to analysis for whole-program analysis, Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering, p.199-215, September 06-10, 1999, Toulouse, France
• 19: Feng Qian , Laurie Hendren, An adaptive, region-based allocator for java, Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on Memory management, June 20-21, 2002, Berlin, Germany
• 20: R. Rugina and S. Cherem. Region analysis for imperative programs. Technical Report CS TR2003-1914, Cornell University, October 2003.
• 21: Alexandru Salcianu , Martin Rinard, Pointer and escape analysis for multithreaded programs, Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practices of parallel programming, p.12-23, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States
• 22: Bjarne Steensgaard, Points-to analysis in almost linear time, Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.32-41, January 21-24, 1996, St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, United States [doi>10.1145/237721.237727]
• 23: Mads Tofte , Jean-Pierre Talpin, Implementation of the typed call-by-value λ-calculus using a stack of regions, Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, p.188-201, January 16-19, 1994, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/174675.177855]
• 24: Raja Vallée-Rai , Phong Co , Etienne Gagnon , Laurie Hendren , Patrick Lam , Vijay Sundaresan, Soot - a Java bytecode optimization framework, Proceedings of the 1999 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, p.13, November 08-11, 1999, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
• 25: John Whaley , Martin Rinard, Compositional pointer and escape analysis for Java programs, Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.187-206, November 01-05, 1999, Denver, Colorado, United States
• 26: Tim Wilkinson. Kaffe -- a free Java virtual machine. http://www.kaffe.org.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Compilers

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Memory management (garbage collection)

  F. Theory of Computation
  F.3 LOGICS AND MEANINGS OF PROGRAMS
      F.3.2 Semantics of Programming Languages
          Subjects: Program analysis

General Terms:
Languages, Performance

Keywords:
pointer analysis, program transformations, region-based memory management