Abstract Compilation for Sharing Analysis

An abstract domain for non pair-sharing and freeness analysis of logic programs has been recently developed by using the automatic technique of linear refinement. W.r.t. previously available domains, it can be used for abstract compilation, which allows a modular and goal-independent analysis of logic programs. In this paper, we describe our implementation of an analyser which uses that domain. Sometimes, we have sacrificed precision for efficiency. We evaluate it over a set of benchmarks and we compare the results with those obtained through a goal-dependent analysis. Not surprisingly, our goal-independent analysis is slower. However, it is almost always as precise as the goal-dependent one. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first goal-independent implementation of sharing analysis based on abstract interpretation, as well as the first implementation of a linearly refined domain.