Re: [Caml-list] unused function detection

[Michael Furr <furr@cs.umd.edu>]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004, Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> Since there is no guarantee that after removing the functions called zero
> time, you program will even compile , what he needs is actually a statical
> analysis tool using a code coverage algorithm, given one or more entry
> points. This analysis can find without even executing the program the most
> small subset of functions needed in order to compile the applications.
> That's actually quite an interesting piece of code to write in a functional
> language, and it would be nice if it can detects also unused *types*.

I just finished(well almost) writing a tool which does something very
similar.  The motivation was if I have some module M and a program P, what
is the most general(opaque) signature for M which still lets P compile.
This information can be extremely useful since you know exactly which
types are used opaquely and thus you can safely re-implement those data
structures.  Also, if you have some internal function in a module and it
is not used anywhere in the program, it won't show up in the resulting
signature.

-mike

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