Detection and Recovery of Endangered Variables Caused by Instruction Scheduling

A. Adl-Tabatabai and T. Gross, "Detection and Recovery of Endangered Variables Caused by Instruction Scheduling", Proc. SIGPLAN Symp. on Programming Language Design and Implementation, June, 1993, 13-25.

Abstract

Instruction scheduling re-orders and interleaves instruction sequences from different source statements. This impacts the task of a symbolic debugger, which attempts to present the user a picture of program execution that matches the source program. At a breakpoint B , if the value in the run-time location of a variable V may not correspond to the value the user expects V to have, then this variable is endangered at B . This paper describes an approach to detecting and recovering endangered variables caused by instruction scheduling. We measure the effects of instruction scheduling on a symbolic debugger's ability to recover source values at a breakpoint. This paper reports measurements for three C programs from the SPEC suite and a collection of programs from the Numerical Recipes, which have been compiled with a variant of a commercial C compiler.

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