Flexibo : language and its application to static analysis

This thesis introduces a new object-based language FlexibO to support prototype development paradigm and more importantly, program static analysis. FlexibO offers extreme flexibility and hence enables developers to write programs that contain rich information for further analysis and optimization. FlexibO interpreter's seamless integration with Java (including direct access to Java classes and methods and direct inheritance of Java classes) makes it a suitable tool for fast prototype software development. FlexibO's extreme flexibility allows developers to redefine the behavior of program evaluation by overriding its default evaluation method. This mechanism can be used to translate FlexibO to other efficient languages. In this thesis we design a translator in FlexibO to translate Bulk-Synchronous Parallel specifications (expressed in FlexibO) to executable C pro grams linked with BSPLib. Before translation, the tool first checks syntax and type, then statically analyzes potential communication conflicts, and finally generates C code. The translation process can accurately analyze primitive commands but require approximation (using abstract interpretation) for more advanced commands such as loops. The appropriateness of the translator and the associated static analysis can be formally analyzed using the technique of normal form.