A New Perspective for Understanding Data Flow Analysis

摘要

Data flow analysis is a technique that is widely used in compilers and program analysis tools. A lot of practical problems use data flow analysis, e.g. live variable analysis. The usual way of solving data flow analysis problem is to solve for the fix point of some simultaneous equations. This is done via an iterative process. In this paper, we argue that data flow analysis can be understood as a temporal logic model checking problem. We illustrate this idea using the problem of live variable analysis. This provides a new perspective for understanding data flow analysis.