Communications of the ACM
OCCAM-v2: Combining Static and Dynamic Analysis for Effective and Efficient Whole-Program Specialization
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Software has evolved to support diverse sets of features. Agile software engineering practices, such as code designed for reusability, introduce redundant code. In a common motif, entire libraries are linked where only a small number of functions are needed. The accumulation of extraneous code can negatively impact application users who need to access only a subset of these features.
At one end of the spectrum of concerns, embedded systems are typically provisioned with a limited amount of memory. The presence of code that unnecessarily takes space can increase cost and adversely affect performance. At the other end, cloud computing platforms provisioned with bloated code may suffer from a commensurately increased internal attack surface, through mechanisms such as return-oriented,18 jump-oriented,3 call-oriented,17 and data-oriented10 programming.
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