Points-to Analysis as a System of Linear Equations

The efficiency of a points-to analysis is critical for several compiler optimizations and transformations, and has attracted considerable research attention. Despite several advances, the trade-off between precision and scalability still remains a key issue. In this work, we propose a novel formulation of the points-to analysis as a system of linear equations. With this, the efficiency of the points-to analysis can be significantly improved by leveraging the advances in solution procedures for solving the systems of linear equations. We demonstrate that the proposed transformation is non-trivial and becomes challenging due to the following facts, namely, multiple pointer indirections, address-of operators and multiple assignments to the same variable. The problem is exacerbated by the need to keep the transformed equations linear. Despite this, we successfully model all the pointer operations. The main technical contribution of our work is a novel inclusion based context-sensitive po...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SAS
• Authors: Rupesh Nasre, Ramaswamy Govindarajan
• Keywords: Analysis Algorithm, Formal Methods, Linear Equations, Points-to Analysis, SAS 2010