2026-07-25T23:25:15Z https://drops.dagstuhl.de/oai

oai:drops-oai.dagstuhl.de:6109 2024-03-06T10:38:00Z ddc:004 open_access

Program Tailoring: Slicing by Sequential Criteria Li, Yue Tan, Tian Zhang, Yifei Xue, Jingling Program Slicing Program Analysis API Protocol Analysis Protocol and typestate analyses often report some sequences of statements ending at a program point P that needs to be scrutinized, since P may be erroneous or imprecisely analyzed. Program slicing focuses only on the behavior at P by computing a slice of the program affecting the values at P. In this paper, we propose to restrict our attention to the subset of that behavior at P affected by one or several statement sequences, called a sequential criterion (SC). By leveraging the ordering information in a SC, e.g., the temporal order in a few valid/invalid API method invocation sequences, we introduce a new technique, program tailoring, to compute a tailored program that comprises the statements in all possible execution paths passing through at least one sequence in SC in the given order. With a prototyping implementation, Tailor, we show why tailoring is practically useful by conducting two case studies on seven large real-world Java applications. For program debugging and understanding, Tailor can complement program slicing by removing SC-irrelevant statements. For program analysis, Tailor can enable a pointer analysis, which is unscalable to a program, to perform a more focused and therefore potentially scalable analysis to its specific parts containing hard language features such as reflection. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Yue Li and Tian Tan and Yifei Zhang and Jingling Xue 2016 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 56, 30th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2016) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.15 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-61092 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2016.15 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode