Trace-based Debloat for Java Bytecode
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Software bloat is code that is packaged in an application but is actually not used and not necessary to run the application. The presence of bloat is an issue for software security, for performance, and for maintenance. In recent years, several works have proposed techniques to detect and remove software bloat. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to debloat Java bytecode through dynamic analysis, which we call trace-based debloat. We have developed JDBL, a tool that automates the collection of accurate execution traces and the debloating process. Given a Java project and a workload, JDBL generates a debloated version of the project that is syntactically correct and preserves the original behavior, modulo the workload. We evaluate the feasibility and the effectiveness of trace-based debloat with 395 open-source Java libraries for a total 10M+ lines of code. We demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the size of these libraries while preserving the functionalities needed by their clients.
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