A language for conveying the aliasing properties of dynamic, pointer-based data structures

High-performance architectures rely upon powerful optimizing and parallelizing compilers to maximize performance. Such compilers need accurate program analysis to enable their performance-enhancing transformations. In the domain of program analysis for parallelization, pointer analysis is a difficult and increasingly common problem. When faced with dynamic, pointer-based data structures, existing solutions are either too limited in the types of data structures they can analyze, or require too much effort on the part of the programmer. In this paper we present a powerful description language for expressing the aliasing properties of dynamic date structures. Such descriptions provide the compiler with better information during alias analysis, and require only minimal effort from the programmer. Ultimately, this enables a more accurate program analysis, and an increased application of performance-enhancing transformations.<
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