An Experiment Combining Specialization with Abstract Interpretation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a modular, off-the-shelf partial evaluation tool can be used with an abstract interpreter to achieve control-flow refinement, improving program analysis techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a language-independent framework combining property-based abstraction with partial evaluation for specialized program transformation.

Findings

Achieved control-flow refinement using existing partial evaluation tools.

Reconstructed a specialized control-flow refinement method in a modular way.

Provided a practical, language-independent approach to program specialization.

Abstract

It was previously shown that control-flow refinement can be achieved by a program specializer incorporating property-based abstraction, to improve termination and complexity analysis tools. We now show that this purpose-built specializer can be reconstructed in a more modular way, and that the previous results can be achieved using an off-the-shelf partial evaluation tool, applied to an abstract interpreter. The key feature of the abstract interpreter is the abstract domain, which is the product of the property-based abstract domain with the concrete domain. This language-independent framework provides a practical approach to implementing a variety of powerful specializers, and contributes to a stream of research on using interpreters and specialization to achieve program transformations.