A Hierarchical Approach to Context-Sensitive Interprocedural Alias Analysis

In this paper, we present a hierarchical flow-sensitive alias analysis algorithm which parameterizes the context-sensitive level. Our approach groups the pointers in a program by their maximum possible dereference levels. It then orders the analysis of each pointer group by its pointer level, starti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bixia Zheng, Pen-chung Yew
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 1999
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.8163
http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/Agassiz/Paper/bzheng.tr99-018.ps
Description
Summary:In this paper, we present a hierarchical flow-sensitive alias analysis algorithm which parameterizes the context-sensitive level. Our approach groups the pointers in a program by their maximum possible dereference levels. It then orders the analysis of each pointer group by its pointer level, starting from the highest level down to the lowest level. During the analysis of each pointer group, a bottom-up traversal of a program call graph is followed by a top-down traversal with the necessary interprocedural information propagated along the way. The interprocedural information is tagged with call-chains, which are the program call graph paths, to achieve context-sensitivity. We also provide empirical results to quantify how different context-sensitive levels affect the precision and the efficiency of the algorithm. Our studies show that (1) the precision improvement achieved by increasing the context-sensitive level of the analysis varies significantly depending on the programs analyzed;.