Large Spurious Cycle in Global Static Analyses and Its Algorithmic Mitigation

We present a simple algorithmic extension of the classical call-strings approach to mitigate substantial performance degradation caused by spurious interprocedural cycles. Spurious interprocedural cycles are, in a realistic setting, key reasons for why approximate call-return semantics in both context-sensitive and -insensitive static analysis can make the analysis much slower than expected. In the traditional call-strings-based context-sensitive static analysis, because the number of distinguished contexts must be finite, multiple call-contexts are inevitably joined at the entry of a procedure and the output at the exit is propagated to multiple returnsites. We found that these multiple returns frequently create a single large cycle (we call it “butterfly cycle”) covering almost all parts of the program and such a spurious cycle makes analyses very slow and inaccurate. Our simple algorithmic technique (within the fixpoint iteration algorithm) identifies and prunes these spuri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: APLAS
• Authors: Hakjoo Oh
• Keywords: APLAS 2009, Programming Languages, Simple Algorithmic Extension, Spurious Interprocedural Cycles, Static Analysis