Articles

Flexible Pointer Analysis Using Assign-Fetch Graphs

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

We propose a new abstraction for pointer analysis that represents reads and writes to memory instead of traditional points-to relations. Compared to points-to graphs, our Assign-Fetch Graph (AFG) leads to concise procedure summaries that can be used in any calling context. Also, its flexibility supports new analysis techniques with different trade-offs between speed and precision. For efficiency, we build a summary for each procedure that assumes distinct pointers from the environment are not aliased and restore soundness when the summary is used in a context with aliases. We present two pointer analysis techniques based on our AFG. The first takes the flow-insensitive view adopted by many authors; the second considers statement ordering. In addition to being more precise, we find that this "flow-aware" analysis runs faster. We conclude with experimental results showing it is practical.

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Title
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing 2008, Fortaleza, CearĂ¡, Brazil, March 16-20, 2008
Publisher
ACM
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/1363686.1363746

More About This Work

Academic Units
Computer Science
Published Here
March 7, 2012