Fine-Grained Library Customization
This addresses performance and security issues in software development, but it is incremental as it builds on existing dependence analysis techniques.
The paper tackled code bloat in statically linked libraries by analyzing midilib and demonstrated that dependence analysis can trim resultless code statements, potentially enabling automated tools for this purpose.
Code bloat widely exists in production-run software. Left untackled, it not only degrades software performance but also increases its attack surface. In this work, we conduct a case study to understand this issue in statically linked libraries. To be specific, we analyze midilib, a software package enclosing statically linked libraries. We show that it is possible to leverage dependence analysis to trim the resultless code statements re- siding in a target library. With this observation, we believe it is possible to build a tool to automatically cut off code pertaining to resultless operations.