Report Number: CSL-TR-87-342
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Interprocedural analysis useless for code optimization
Author: Richardson, S.
Author: Ganapathi, M.
Date: November 1987
Abstract: The problem of tracking data flow across procedure boundaries has a long history of theoretical study by people who believed that such information would be useful for code optimization. Building upon previous work, we have implemented an algorithm for interprocedural data flow analysis. The algorithm produces three flow-insensitive summary sets: MOD, USE, and ALIASES. The utility of the resulting information was investigated using an optimizing Pascal compiler. Over a sampling of 27 benchmarks, we found that additional optimizations performed as a result of interprocedural summary information contributed almost nothing to program execution speed.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/87/342/CSL-TR-87-342.pdf