Detecting dead statements for concurrent programs

With more and more concurrent programs being used in practice, technique and tools to analyze such programs are urgently needed. Due to the schedule, race conditions and synchronization among processes (threads), some statements may never be executed. Such statements are dead statements and have no influence on the programs except make them more difficult to analyze and understand. Therefore, the paper develops a data flow approach to detect dead statements for concurrent programs. With this method concurrent programs are represented by concurrent control flow graphs in a simple and precise way, and detecting rules are extracted by analyzing program behavior. Based on these rules, we propose a dead statement-detecting algorithm