article

Open access

Escape analysis for Java^TM: Theory and practice

Author:

Bruno BlanchetAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Volume 25, Issue 6

Pages 713 - 775

https://doi.org/10.1145/945885.945886

Published: 01 November 2003 Publication History

PDF eReader

Abstract

Escape analysis is a static analysis that determines whether the lifetime of data may exceed its static scope.This paper first presents the design and correctness proof of an escape analysis for Java^TM. This analysis is interprocedural, context sensitive, and as flow-sensitive as the static single assignment form. So, assignments to object fields are analyzed in a flow-insensitive manner. Since Java is an imperative language, the effect of assignments must be precisely determined. This goal is achieved thanks to our technique using two interdependent analyses, one forward, one backward. We introduce a new method to prove the correctness of this analysis, using aliases as an intermediate step. We use integers to represent the escaping parts of values, which leads to a fast and precise analysis.Our implementation [Blanchet 1999], which applies to the whole Java language, is then presented. Escape analysis is applied to stack allocation and synchronization elimination. In our benchmarks, we stack allocate 13% to 95% of data, eliminate more than 20% of synchronizations on most programs (94% and 99% on two examples) and get up to 43% runtime decrease (21% on average). Our detailed experimental study on large programs shows that the improvement comes more from the decrease of the garbage collection and allocation times than from improvements on data locality, contrary to what happened for ML. This comes from the difference in the garbage collectors.

References

[1]

Agesen, O., Detlefs, D., Garthwaite, A., Knippel, R., Ramakrishna, Y. S., and White, D. 1999. An efficient meta-lock for implementing ubiquitous synchronization. In Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'99, Denver, CO). ACM Press, New York, 207--222.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[2]

Aiken, A., Fähndrich, M., and Levien, R. 1995. Better static memory management: Improving region-based analysis of higher-order languages. In SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'95, La Jolla, CA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 174--185.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[3]

Aldrich, J., Chambers, C., Sirer, E. G., and Eggers, S. 1999. Static analyses for eliminating unnecessary synchronization from Java programs. In Static Analysis Symposium (SAS'99, Venice, Italy). Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 1694. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 19--38.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[4]

Bacon, D. F. 1997. Fast and efficient optimization of statically typed object-oriented languages. Ph.D. thesis. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[5]

Bacon, D. F., Konuru, R., Murthy, C., and Serrano, M. 1998. Thin locks: Featherweight synchronization for Java. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'98 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'98, Montreal, Canada). ACM Press, New York, NY, 258--268.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Birkedal, L., Tofte, M., and Vejlstrup, M. 1996. From region inference to von Neumann machines via region representation inference. In 23rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'96, St. Petersburg Beach, FL). ACM Press, New York, NY, 171--183.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[7]

Blanchet, B. 1998. Escape analysis: Correctness proof, implementation and experimental results. In 25th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'98, San Diego, CA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 25--37.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Blanchet, B. 1999. Escape analysis for object oriented languages. Application to JavaTM. In Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'99, Denver, CO). ACM Press, New York, NY, 20--34.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

Blanchet, B. 2000. Escape analysis. Applications to ML and JavaTM. Ph.D. thesis, École Polytechnique.]]

Google Scholar

[10]

Bogda, J. and Hölzle, U. 1999. Removing unnecessary synchronization in Java. In Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'99, Denver, CO). ACM Press, New York, NY, 35--46.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[11]

Carr, S., McKinley, K. S., and Tseng, C.-W. 1994. Compiler optimizations for improving data locality. In 6th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS'94). ACM Press, New York, NY, 252--262.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[12]

Chase, D. R. 1988. Safety considerations for storage allocation optimizations. In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN'88 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'88, Atlanta, GA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 1--10.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[13]

Choi, J.-D., Gupta, M., Serrano, M., Sreedhar, V. C., and Midkiff, S. 1999. Escape analysis for Java. In Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'99, Denver, CO). ACM Press, New York, NY, 1--19.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[14]

Cousot, P. and Cousot, R. 1977. Abstract interpretation: A unified lattice model for static analysis of programs by construction or approximation of fixpoints. In Conference Record of the 4th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (Los Angeles, CA.). ACM Press, New York, NY, 238--252.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[15]

Cousot, P. and Cousot, R. 1979. Systematic design of program analysis frameworks. In Conference Record of the 6th Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (San Antonio, TX). ACM Press, New York, NY, 269--282.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[16]

Cytron, R., Ferrante, J., Rosen, B. K., Wegman, M. N., and Zadeck, F. K. 1991. Efficiently computing static single assignment form and the control dependance graph. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 13, 4 (Oct.), 451--490.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[17]

Dean, J., Grove, D., and Chambers, C. 1995. Optimization of object-oriented programs using static class hierarchy analysis. In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 952. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 77--101.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[18]

Deutsch, A. 1990. On determining lifetime and aliasing of dynamically allocated data in higher-order functional specifications. In 17th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. (San Francisco, CA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 157--168.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[19]

Deutsch, A. 1994. Interprocedural may-alias analysis for pointers: Beyond k-limiting. In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN'94 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'94, Orlando, FL). ACM Press, New York, NY, 230--241.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[20]

Deutsch, A. 1997. On the complexity of escape analysis. In 24th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'97, Paris, France). ACM Press, New York, NY, 358--371.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[21]

Diniz, P. C. and Rinard, M. C. 1998. Lock coarsening: Eliminating lock overhead in automatically parallelized object-based programs. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 49, 2 (Mar.), 218--244.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[22]

Fitzgerald, R., Knoblock, T. B., Ruf, E., Steensgaard, B., and Tarditi, D. 2000. Marmot: An optimizing compiler for Java. Softw. Pract. Exper. 30, 3 (Mar.), 199--232.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[23]

Gay, D. and Steensgaard, B. 2000. Fast escape analysis and stack allocation for object-based programs. In Compiler Construction, 9th International Conference, CC'2000, D. A. Watt, Ed. Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 1781. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 82--93.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[24]

Harrison, W. 1989. The interprocedural analysis and automatic parallelisation of Scheme programs. J. Lisp Symb. Comput. 2, 176--396.]]

Google Scholar

[25]

Hederman, L. 1988. Compile time garbage collection using reference count analysis. Tech. rep. Rice COMP TR88-75, Rice University, Houston, TX.]]

Google Scholar

[26]

Horwitz, S., Demers, A., and Teitelbaum, T. 1987. An efficient general iterative algorithm for dataflow analysis. Acta Inf. 24, 6, 679--694.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[27]

Hudak, P. 1986. A semantic model of reference counting and its abstraction (detailed summary). In Proceedings of the 1986 ACM Conference on LISP and Functional Programming (Cambridge, MA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 351--363.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[28]

Hughes, S. 1992. Compile-time garbage collection for higher-order functional languages. J. Logic Comput. 2, 4, 483--509.]]

Crossref

Google Scholar

[29]

Inoue, K., Seki, H., and Yagi, H. 1988. Analysis of functional programs to detect run-time garbage cells. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 10, 4 (Oct.), 555--578.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[30]

Jones, N. D. and Muchnick, S. 1982. A flexible approach to interprocedural data flow analysis and programs with recursive data structures. In 9th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (Albuquerque, NM). ACM Press, New York, NY, 66--74.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[31]

McDowell, C. E. 1998. Reducing garbage in Java. ACM Sigplan Not. 33, 9 (Sept.), 84--86.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[32]

Mohnen, M. 1995a. Efficient closure utilisation by higher-order inheritance analysis. In Static Analysis Symposium (SAS'95). Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 983. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 261--278.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[33]

Mohnen, M. 1995b. Efficient compile-time garbage collection for arbitrary data structure. In Symposium on Programming Language Implementation and Logic Programming (PLILP'95). Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 982. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 241--258.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[34]

Muller, G., Moura, B., Bellard, F., and Consel, C. 1997. Harissa: A flexible and efficient Java environment mixing bytecode and compiled code. In 3rd Usenix Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'97). Portland, OR, 1--20.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[35]

Onodera, T. and Kawachiya, K. 1999. A study of locking objects with bimodal fields. In Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'99, Denver, CO). ACM Press, New York, NY, 223--237.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[36]

Park, Y. G. and Goldberg, B. 1992. Escape analysis on lists. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN'92 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'92, San Francisco, CA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 116--127.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[37]

Qian, Z. 1998. A formal specification of JavaTM virtual machine instructions for objects, methods and subroutines. In Formal Syntax and Semantics of Java(tm), J. Alves-Foss, Ed. Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 1523. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[38]

Ruf, E. 2000. Effective synchronization removal for Java. In ACM SIGPLAN 2000 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'00, Vancouver, Canada). ACM Press, New York, NY, 208--218.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[39]

Ruggieri, C. and Murtagh, T. P. 1988. Lifetime analysis of dynamically allocated objects. In Proceedings of the 15th Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'88, San Diego, CA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 285--293.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[40]

Serrano, M. and Feeley, M. 1996. Storage use analysis and its applications. In 1996 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP, Philadelphia, PA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 50--61.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[41]

Shivers, O. 1988. Control flow analysis in Scheme. In Proceedings of the SIGPLAN'88 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI'88, Atlanta, GA). ACM Press, New York, NY, 164--174.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[42]

Tofte, M. and Talpin, J.-P. 1993. A theory of stack allocation in polymorphically typed languages. Tech. rep. 93/15, Departement of Computer Science, Copenhagen University, Copenhagen, Denmark.]]

Google Scholar

[43]

Weiss, M. et al. 1998. TurboJ: A Java bytecode-to-native compiler. In Proceedings of Workshop on Languages, Compilers and Tools for Embedded Systems. Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol. 1474. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 119--130.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[44]

Whaley, J. and Rinard, M. 1999. Compositional pointer and escape analysis for Java programs. In Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA'99, Denver, CO). ACM Press, New York, NY, 187--206.]]

Digital Library

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Anand AAdithya SRustagi SSeth PSundaresan VMaier DNandivada VThakur M(2024)Optimistic Stack Allocation and Dynamic Heapification for Managed RuntimesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563898:PLDI(296-319)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656389
Bairi RSonwane AKanade AC. VIyer AParthasarathy SRajamani SAshok BShet S(2024)CodePlan: Repository-Level Coding using LLMs and PlanningProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437571:FSE(675-698)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643757
Anand AThakur M(2024)Partial program analysis for staged compilation systemsFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-024-00458-xOnline publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-024-00458-x
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Escape analysis for Java^TM: Theory and practice
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Allocation / deallocation strategies
        Process management
        Multithreading
        Process synchronization

Recommendations

Escape analysis in the context of dynamic compilation and deoptimization
VEE '05: Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments

In object-oriented programming languages, an object is said to escape the method or thread in which it was created if it can also be accessed by other methods or threads. Knowing which objects do not escape allows a compiler to perform aggressive ...
Escape analysis for synchronization removal
SAC '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Applied computing

In this paper we introduce our escape analysis framework for Java, which is a kind of flow-insensitive, inter-procedural, and context-sensitive data flow analysis. And we present an efficient static intra-procedural algorithm for inferring the set of ...
Practical escape analyses: how good are they?
VEE '07: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Virtual execution environments

A key analysis developed for the compilation of parallel programs is thread escape analysis (hereafter referred to as escape analysis), which determines what objects are accessed in more than one thread, and which references within a program are ...

Reviews

Reviewer: Michael Zastre

Escape analysis is becoming increasingly important for those interested in constructing compilers for the Java programming language. An object is said to escape a subsystem when that object can be accessed from outside of the system; the analysis is actually an extension of traditional aliasing analysis. If we know that an object does not escape a subsystem, then we can use that information to optimize away some of the expense of using the object (namely, eliminate some locking/unlocking operations on the object, hence reducing runtime overhead). This paper on escape analysis is organized into three broad parts. The first part includes sections 1, 2, and 3, and describes the benefits obtained from escape analysis in Java, such as stack allocation and synchronization elimination. Also included in this part of the paper is a review of previous work in the area. Sections 4 through 7 make up the middle part of the paper, which is the most difficult to understand. Readers unfamiliar with abstract interpretation may wish to have a copy of Abstract interpretation of declarative languages [1] handy when reading it. Of particular interest here is a description of a less precise, but fast, escape analysis that approximates access paths by type height. This is where abstract interpretation comes into play, in that one kind of value (a list of fields, array indexes, and so on, used to obtain a value) is approximated by another, simpler kind of value (for example, we can infer relations between paths by their lengths, with lengths represented as integers). Sections 8 through 12 comprise the final part of the paper, and focus on an actual implementation of the analyses and optimizations. Papers applying abstract interpretation to imperative languages are relatively rare, and this paper has even greater relevance for compiler writers, given its description of an actual implementation. The paper is definitely not an easy read, but should be required reading for all those interested in applying static analyses to Java. Online Computing Reviews Service

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Become a reviewer for Computing Reviews.

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems

ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems Volume 25, Issue 6

November 2003

198 pages

ISSN:0164-0925

EISSN:1558-4593

DOI:10.1145/945885

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2003

Published in TOPLAS Volume 25, Issue 6

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

79
Total Citations
View Citations
2,087
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)154
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)43

Reflects downloads up to 04 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Anand AAdithya SRustagi SSeth PSundaresan VMaier DNandivada VThakur M(2024)Optimistic Stack Allocation and Dynamic Heapification for Managed RuntimesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563898:PLDI(296-319)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656389
Bairi RSonwane AKanade AC. VIyer AParthasarathy SRajamani SAshok BShet S(2024)CodePlan: Repository-Level Coding using LLMs and PlanningProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36437571:FSE(675-698)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3643757
Anand AThakur M(2024)Partial program analysis for staged compilation systemsFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-024-00458-xOnline publication date: 13-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-024-00458-x
Weingarten MTheodoridis TProkopec AKotselidis CProkopec A(2022)Inlining-Benefit Prediction with Interprocedural Partial Escape AnalysisProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages10.1145/3563838.3567677(13-24)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563838.3567677
Anand AThakur M(2022)Principles of Staged Static+Dynamic Partial AnalysisStatic Analysis10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_4(44-73)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-22308-2_4
Larus JRajwar RLarus JRajwar R(2022)Programming Transactional MemoryTransactional Memory10.1007/978-3-031-01719-3_2(15-52)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01719-3_2
Thakur MKell SVerna D(2020)How (not) to write Java pointer analyses after 2020Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3426428.3426923(134-145)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3426428.3426923
Wang CZhang MJiang YZhang HXing ZGu MRothermel GBae D(2020)Escape from escape analysis of GolangProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice10.1145/3377813.3381368(142-151)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377813.3381368
Lang CStilkerich I(2020)Design and Implementation of an Escape Analysis in the Context of Safety-Critical Embedded SystemsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/337213319:1(1-20)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3372133
Thakur MNandivada V(2019)PYEACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/333779441:3(1-37)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3337794
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Escape analysis in the context of dynamic compilation and deoptimization

Escape analysis for synchronization removal

Practical escape analyses: how good are they?

Reviews

Access critical reviews of Computing literature here

Comments

Information

Published In

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View options

PDF

eReader

Get Access

Login options

Full Access

Figures

Other

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations