A bottom-up pointer analysis using the update history

Hyun-Goo Kang, Taisook Han
2009 Information and Software Technology  
Pointer analysis is an important part for the source code analysis of C programs. In this paper, we propose a bottom-up and flow-and context-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm, where bottom-up refers to the ability to perform the analysis from callee modules to caller modules. Our approach is based on a new modular pointer analysis domain named the update history that can abstract memory states of a procedure independently of the information on aliases between memory locations and keep the
more » ... ormation on the order of side effects performed. Such a memory representation not only enables the analysis to be formalized as a bottom-up analysis, but also helps the analysis to effectively identify killed side effects and relevant alias contexts. The experiments performed on a pilot implementation of the method shows that our approach is effective for improving the precision of a client analysis.
doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2008.11.003 fatcat:6xjmjw4ptzdlrnsdvlsqqmqsqe