Object-oriented applications may contain data members that can be removed from the application without affecting program behavior. Such ``dead'' data members may occur due to unused functionality in class libraries, or due to the programmer losing track of member usage as the application changes over time. We present a simple and efficient algorithm for detecting dead data members in C++ applications. This algorithm has been implemented using a prototype version of the IBM VisualAge C++ compiler, and applied to a number of realistic benchmark programs ranging from 600 to 58,000 lines of code. For the non-trivial benchmarks, we found that up to 27.3\% of the data members in the benchmarks are dead (average 12.5\%), and that up to 11.6\% of the object space of these applications may be occupied by dead data members at run-time (average 4.4\%).
By: Peter F. Sweeney and Frank Tip
Published in: RC21051 in
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