S. Schaeckeler, W. Shang and R. Davis, "Visualization of procedural abstraction". In Enectronic News in Theoretical Computer Science, volumne 224, pages 27-39, 2009.

Abstract - Visualizing impacts of an optimization pass helps to reason about, and to gain insight into, the inner workings of the optimization pass. In this paper, we visualize the impacts of two procedural abstraction passes. For this, we modified two procedural abstraction post pass optimizers to visualize for each the difference in machine code before and after optimization by drawing abstracted fragments in the original program. We then explain how the generated visualizations aid in better understanding the optimization passes.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors---Code Generation, Compilers, Optimization; E.4 [Coding And Information Theory]: Data Compaction and Compression---program representation

General Terms: Languages, Performance, Experimentation

Keywords: Visualization of computational processes, program visualization, program understanding, compiler understanding, code compaction, procedural abstraction, post pass optimization