Waterloo Programming Languages Seminars

Previous terms: S12 F11 S11 W11 F10 S10 F08 S08 W08 F07 W07 F06 S06 W06

Current term:

Date Speaker Title (click for abstract) Location
Mon. Dec. 10, 2012 at 10:30 am Max Schaefer Approximate Call Graphs for JavaScript DC 2585

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To volunteer to give a talk, contact Ondřej Lhoták. Talks can range from informal to formal, and they can be about any of the following:

The purpose is for us all to see what people are interested in, and motivate discussions.

Abstracts

Approximate Call Graphs for JavaScript

Max Schaefer
Dec. 10, 2012
The rapid rise of JavaScript as one of the most popular programming languages of the present day has led to a demand for sophisticated IDE support similar to what is available for Java or C#. However, advanced tooling is hampered by the dynamic nature of the language, which makes any form of static analysis very difficult. We single out efficient call graph construction as a key problem to be solved in order to improve development tools for JavaScript. To address this problem, we present a scalable field-based flow analysis for constructing call graphs. Our evaluation on large real-world programs shows that the analysis, while in principle unsound, produces highly accurate call graphs in practice. Previous analyses do not scale to these programs, but our analysis handles them in a matter of seconds, thus proving its suitability for use in an interactive setting.