Demand-on-Demand Control-Flow Analysis

Understanding program behaviors requires reasoning about control flow. Functional programs complicate this reasoning since call targets are computed in general. Control-flow analysis (CFA) can effectively reason about control flow (and much more) but is costly. Demand-driven CFA is less expensive but less versatile, and it is difficult to make it do what classical CFA does. This is unfortunate because many fundamental optimizations rely on control flow reasoning. In this paper, we present Demand-on-Demand Control-Flow Analysis (DoDCFA), a hybrid exhaustive--demand-driven CFA that recovers some of the versatility/applicability of classical CFA while improving on the speed of Demand CFA. The result is an analysis that can inexpensively and effectively analyze control flow and environment behavior sufficient to justify inlining.

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Publication Details

Journal
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Published
2026-08-17
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3828687
Primary Topic
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
Type
article
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article

Demand-on-Demand Control-Flow Analysis

Kimball Germane, Chahyun Kang
Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
article

Demand-on-Demand Control-Flow Analysis

Kimball Germane, Chahyun Kang
article en

Abstract

Understanding program behaviors requires reasoning about control flow. Functional programs complicate this reasoning since call targets are computed in general. Control-flow analysis (CFA) can effectively reason about control flow (and much more) but is costly. Demand-driven CFA is less expensive but less versatile, and it is difficult to make it do what classical CFA does. This is unfortunate because many fundamental optimizations rely on control flow reasoning. In this paper, we present Demand-on-Demand Control-Flow Analysis (DoDCFA), a hybrid exhaustive--demand-driven CFA that recovers some of the versatility/applicability of classical CFA while improving on the speed of Demand CFA. The result is an analysis that can inexpensively and effectively analyze control flow and environment behavior sufficient to justify inlining.

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesVol. 10(ICFP)
Brigham Young University (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 7%
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
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