Demand-driven points-to analysis for Java

We present a points-to analysis technique suitable for environments with small time and memory budgets, such as just-in-time (JIT) compilers and interactive development environments (IDEs). Our technique is demand-driven, performing only the work necessary to answer each query (a request for a variable’s points-to information) issued by a client. In cases where even the demand-driven approach exceeds the time budget for a query, we employ early termination, i.e., stopping the analysis prematurely and returning an over-approximated result to the client. Our technique improves on previous demand-driven points-to analysis algorithms [17, 33] by achieving much higher precision under small time budgets and early termination. We formulate Andersen’s analysis [5] for Java as a CFLreachability problem [33]. This formulation shows that Andersen’s analysis for Java is a balanced-parentheses problem, an insight that enables our new techniques. We exploit the balanced parentheses structure ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Manu Sridharan, Denis Gopan, Lexin Shan, Rastislav Bodík
• Keywords: Andersen’s Analysis, OOPSLA 2005, Points-to Analysis, Time Budgets