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Liveness-Based Pointer Analysis

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Static Analysis (SAS 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7460))

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Abstract

Precise flow- and context-sensitive pointer analysis (FCPA) is generally considered prohibitively expensive for large programs; most tools relax one or both of the requirements for scalability. We argue that precise FCPA has been over-harshly judged—the vast majority of points-to pairs calculated by existing algorithms are never used by any client analysis or transformation because they involve dead variables. We therefore formulate a FCPA in terms of a joint points-to and liveness analysis which we call L-FCPA. We implemented a naive L-FCPA in GCC-4.6.0 using linked lists. Evaluation on SPEC2006 showed significant increase in the precision of points-to pairs compared to GCC’s analysis. Interestingly, our naive implementation turned out to be faster than GCC’s analysis for all programs under 30kLoC. Further, L-FCPA showed that fewer than 4% of basic blocks had more than 8 points-to pairs. We conclude that the usable points-to information and the required context information is small and sparse and argue that approximations (e.g. weakening flow or context sensitivity) are not only undesirable but also unnecessary for performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India

    Uday P. Khedker & Prashant Singh Rawat

  2. University of Cambridge, UK

    Alan Mycroft

Authors
  1. Uday P. Khedker
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  2. Alan Mycroft
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  3. Prashant Singh Rawat
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Département d’Informatique, École Normale Supérieure, 45, rue d’Ulm, 75005, Paris, France

    Antoine Miné

  2. Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, 234 Nichols Hall, 66506, Manhattan, KS, USA

    David Schmidt

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Khedker, U.P., Mycroft, A., Rawat, P.S. (2012). Liveness-Based Pointer Analysis. In: Miné, A., Schmidt, D. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7460. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33125-1_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33125-1_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33124-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33125-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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