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Dynamic Flow Analysis for JavaScript

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Trends in Functional Programming (TFP 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10447))

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Abstract

Static flow analyses compute a safe approximation of a program’s dataflow without executing it. Dynamic flow analyses compute a similar safe approximation by running the program on test data such that it achieves sufficient coverage.

We design and implement a dynamic flow analysis for JavaScript. Our formalization and implementation observe a program’s execution in a training run and generate flow constraints from the observations. We show that a solution of the constraints yields a safe approximation to the program’s dataflow if each path in every function is executed at least once in the training run. As a by-product, we can reconstruct types for JavaScript functions from the results of the flow analysis.

Our implementation shows that dynamic flow analysis is feasible for JavaScript. While our formalization concentrates on a core language, the implementation covers full JavaScript. We evaluated the implementation using the SunSpider benchmark.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Nico Naus

  2. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    Peter Thiemann

Authors
  1. Nico Naus
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  2. Peter Thiemann
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Correspondence to Nico Naus .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    David Van Horn

  2. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    John Hughes

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Naus, N., Thiemann, P. (2019). Dynamic Flow Analysis for JavaScript. In: Van Horn, D., Hughes, J. (eds) Trends in Functional Programming. TFP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10447. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14805-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14805-8_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14804-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14805-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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