Context-Sensitive Points-to Analysis: Is It Worth It?

We present the results of an empirical study evaluating the precision of subset-based points-to analysis with several variations of context sensitivity on Java benchmarks of significant size. We compare the use of call site strings as the context abstraction, object sensitivity, and the BDD-based context-sensitive algorithm proposed by Zhu and Calman, and by Whaley and Lam. Our study includes analyses that context-sensitively specialize only pointer variables, as well as ones o specialize the heap abstraction. We measure both characteristics of the points-to sets themselves, as well as effects on the precision of client analyses. To guide development of efficient analysis implementations, we measure the number of contexts, the number of distinct contexts, and the number of distinct points-to sets that arise with each context sensitivity variation. To evaluate precision, we measure the size of the call graph in terms of methods and edges, the number of devirtualizable call sites, and th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CC
• Authors: Ondrej Lhoták, Laurie J. Hendren
• Keywords: CC 2006, Context Sensitivity, Context Sensitivity Variation, Heap Abstraction, System Software