Data and Control Flow Visualization by Transforming Software into Schematic Diagrams

摘要

The development of software is still largely based on the sequential programming paradigm. This however does not fit modern multi-core architectures. For optimization of sequential code it is auxiliary to visualize the internal control and data flow. Well-Known data and control flow graphs are ineligible due to their complexity. Dynamic program characteristics which occur through use of pointers aggravate this problem. In this paper we propose a transformation of sequential source code based on dynamic software analysis. The program is divided into parts with static dependencies among one another. These parts can be visualized with electronic circuit diagram layout techniques. The quality of generated layouts is analyzed and multiple improvements are devised leading to a significant simplification of the resulting schematics.