Talk by Jeff Smits about the paper:
Jeff Smits, Eelco Visser. FlowSpec: declarative dataflow analysis specification. In Benoît Combemale, Marjan Mernik, Bernhard Rumpe, editors, Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering, SLE 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada, October 23-24, 2017. pages 221-231, ACM, 2017. [doi] [researchr]
Abstract: We present FlowSpec, a declarative specification language for the domain of dataflow analysis. FlowSpec has declarative support for the specification of control flow graphs of programming languages, and dataflow analyses on these control flow graphs. We define the formal semantics of FlowSpec, which is rooted in Monotone Frameworks. We also discuss a prototype implementation of the language, built in the Spoofax Language Workbench. Finally, we evaluate the expressiveness and conciseness of the language with two case studies. These case studies are analyses for Green-Marl, an industrial, domain-specific language for graph processing. The first case study is a classical dataflow analysis, scaled to this full language. The second case study is a domain-specific analysis of Green-Marl.