Deciding kCFA is complete
for EXPTIME.
David Van Horn and Harry
G. Mairson.
In Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International
Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'08), Victoria,
BC, Canada, September, 2008.
We give an exact characterization of the computational complexity of the kCFA hierarchy. For any k > 0, we prove that the control flow decision problem is complete for deterministic exponential time. This theorem validates empirical observations that such control flow analysis is intractable. It also provides more general insight into the complexity of abstract interpretation.