{"id":186456,"date":"2011-06-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-30T14:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/cfa2-pushdown-flow-analysis-for-higher-order-languages\/"},"modified":"2016-08-22T11:31:33","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T18:31:33","slug":"cfa2-pushdown-flow-analysis-for-higher-order-languages","status":"publish","type":"msr-video","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/video\/cfa2-pushdown-flow-analysis-for-higher-order-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"CFA2: Pushdown Flow Analysis for Higher-Order Languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>Flow analysis is a valuable tool for creating better programming languages; its applications span optimization, debugging, verification and program understanding. Despite its apparent usefulness, flow analysis of higher-order programs has not been made practical. The reason is that existing analyses do not model function call and return well: they remember only a bounded number of pending calls because they approximate programs with control-flow graphs. Call\/return mismatch results in imprecision and increases the analysis time.<\/p>\n<p>We describe CFA2, a flow analysis that provides unbounded call\/return matching in the presence of hard-to-analyze language features, such as first-class functions, tail recursion and first-class control. The key insight is that we can model a higher-order program as a pushdown automaton. By pushing return points on the stack, we eliminate call\/return mismatch. We have implemented CFA2 for JavaScript and used it for type inference. Our experimental results show that the analysis is precise and scalable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Flow analysis is a valuable tool for creating better programming languages; its applications span optimization, debugging, verification and program understanding. Despite its apparent usefulness, flow analysis of higher-order programs has not been made practical. The reason is that existing analyses do not model function call and return well: they remember only a bounded number of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":196218,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[],"msr-video-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-session-type":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"msr-episode":[],"msr-research-theme":[],"class_list":["post-186456","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/n0Cn9duDyuE","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/186456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/186456\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196218"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-session-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-session-type?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-episode","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-episode?post=186456"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-theme?post=186456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}