2007 Reports

A new abstraction for summary-based pointer analysis

Buss, Marcio; Brand, Daniel; Sreedhar, Vugranam; Edwards, Stephen A.

W e propose a new abstraction for pointer analysis based on the principle of matching pointer dereferences or "memory fetches" with pointer assignments. Our abstraction, the Assign-Fetch Graph (AFG), has several advantages over traditional points-to graphs. It leads to concise procedure summaries for pointer analysis and similar computations; each procedure' s summary information can be used effectively in arbitrary calling contexts. Different analysis variations can be formulated on the AFG we present two possible variations. One is based on a standard insensitive view of the program; the other takes some statement ordering into account and produces results that are both more precise and more quickly computed. Our abstraction also facilitates incremental summary-based pointer analysis, which is not generally possible with conventional points-to graphs.