Efficient field-sensitive pointer analysis of C

Author:

Pearce David J.1,Kelly Paul H.J.2,Hankin Chris2

Affiliation:

1. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

2. Imperial College, London, United Kingdom

Abstract

The subject of this article is flow- and context-insensitive pointer analysis. We present a novel approach for precisely modelling struct variables and indirect function calls. Our method emphasises efficiency and simplicity and is based on a simple language of set constraints. We obtain an O ( v 4 ) bound on the time needed to solve a set of constraints from this language, where v is the number of constraint variables. This gives, for the first time, some insight into the hardness of performing field-sensitive pointer analysis of C. Furthermore, we experimentally evaluate the time versus precision trade-off for our method by comparing against the field-insensitive equivalent. Our benchmark suite consists of 11 common C programs ranging in size from 15,000 to 200,000 lines of code. Our results indicate the field-sensitive analysis is more expensive to compute, but yields significantly better precision. In addition, our technique has been integrated into the latest release (version 4.1) of the GNU Compiler GCC. Finally, we identify several previously unknown issues with an alternative and less precise approach to modelling struct variables, known as field-based analysis.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Subject

Software

Reference103 articles.

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2. Introduction to set constraint-based program analysis

3. Type inclusion constraints and type inference

4. Lecture Notes in Computer Science;Alur R.,1998

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