Christian H Stork

Abstract:  Syntax Trees: Towards Safetyby Construction Nowadays almost all code is written in high-level languages|the lowest level language of which is C. When a high level program is compiled into a binary or even bytecode, much of the regular high level structure is lost or, at least, 4 hard to identify. One could argue that this is the price to be paid for high performance as the compiler introduces irregularities in order to optimize the code. This tradeo seems acceptable if all target platforms are known in advance. Considering bytecode as our compilation target | as is the case for all of today's mobile code platforms | compilation to this intermediate code format always reduces performance in the sense that the code receiver is deprived of using optimizations speci c to the original high-level language. One could even argue that bytecode optimizations obfuscate the high-level structure of the original source program making dynamic recompilation harder (but without protecting from reverse engineering).