GUSTT: an amorphous slicing system which combines slicing and transformation

The paper presents a system for amorphous program slicing which combines slicing and transformation to achieve thinner slices than are possible using conventional syntax-preserving slicing. The approach involves the validation of the transformation and slicing steps using the Coq proof assistant, thereby guaranteeing the correctness of the amorphous slices produced. The combined application of slicing and transformation is illustrated with a simple case study. Several components of the system implement transformation tactics, such as side-effect removal and dependence reduction transformations which have wider applications than the construction of amorphous slices.

1 Introduction

This paper introduces the GUSTT¹

GUided Slicing and Targeted Transformation.

amorphous slicing system. The GUSTT system contains slicing and transformation components which are applied together to implement amorphous slicing. Amorphous slicing is a variation of the traditional slicing theme, which retains the semantic properties of traditional slicing while abandoning the syntactic requirements. This leads to thinner slices and allows for the combination of traditional slicing and traditional transformation.