Abstract
Traditional interprocedural data-flow analysis is performed on whole programs; however, such whole-program analysis is not feasible for large or incomplete programs. We propose fragment data-flow analysis as an alternative approach which computes data-flow information for a specific program fragment. The analysis is parameterized by the additional information available about the rest of the program. We describe two frameworks for interprocedural flow-sensitive fragment analysis, the relationship between fragment analysis and whole-program analysis, and the requirements ensuring fragment analysis safety and feasibility. We propose an application of fragment analysis as a second analysis phase after an inexpensive flow-insensitive whole-program analysis, in order to obtain better information for important program fragments. We also describe the design of two fragment analyses derived from an already existing whole-program flow- and context-sensitive pointer alias analysis for C programs and present empirical evaluation of their cost and precision. Our experiments show evidence of dramatically better precision obtainable at a practical cost.
This research was supported, in part, by NSF grants CCR-9501761 and CCR-9804065, and Edison Design Group.
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Rountev, A., Ryder, B.G., Landi, W. (1999). Data-Flow Analysis of Program Fragments. In: Nierstrasz, O., Lemoine, M. (eds) Software Engineering — ESEC/FSE ’99. ESEC SIGSOFT FSE 1999 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1687. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48166-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48166-4_15
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