Experiments on Mutual Dependence between Class Analysis and Exception Analysis

Class analysis and exception analysis are mutually dependent: performing class analysis requires the information of exception analysis, and also performing exception analysis requires the information of class analysis. So, for class analysis and exception analysis to be accurate, these two analyses have to be performed at the same time, even if one of these two analyses may be needed. In this paper, we conducted a study of frequency with which the case of mutual dependence between these two analyses appeared in real Java pro.-rams. We examined a suite of fourteen Java programs, which ranged in size from 72.6 to 3,764.1 KBytes and covers wide range of application area. We found that 0.3% of method calls and 3.5% of throw statements in catch block require the information of exception analysis. This experiment suggests that class analysis can be decoupled from exception analysis with small reduction of analysis accuracy. The safety of each decoupled analysis is guaranteed by using the type information.