Specialization slicing

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate opportunities to be gained from broadening the definition of program slicing. A major inspiration for our work comes from the field of partial evaluation, in which a wide repertoire of techniques have been developed for specializing programs. While slicing can also be harnessed for specializing programs, the kind of specialization obtainable via slicing has heretofore been quite restricted, compared to the kind of specialization allowed in partial evaluation. In particular, most slicing algorithms are what the partial-evaluation community calls monovariant: each program element of the original program generates at most one element in the answer. In contrast, partial-evaluation algorithms can be polyvariant, i.e., one program element in the original program may correspond to more than one element in the specialized program. The full paper appears in ACM TOPLAS 36(2), 2014.