Practical and Accurate Low-Level Pointer Analysis

Pointer analysis is traditionally performed once, early in the compilation process, upon an intermediate representation (IR) with source-code semantics. However, performing pointer analysis only once at this level imposes a phase-ordering constraint, causing alias information to become stale after subsequent code transformations. Moreover, high-level pointer analysis cannot be used at link time or run time, where the source code is unavailable. This paper advocates performing pointer analysis on a low-level intermediate representation. We present the first context-sensitive and partially flow-sensitive points-to analysis designed to operate at the assembly level. As we will demonstrate, low-level pointer analysis can be as accurate as high-level analysis. Additionally, our low-level pointer analysis also enables a quantitative comparison of propagating high-level pointer analysis results through subsequent code transformations, versus recomputing them at the low level. We show that,...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CGO
• Authors: Bolei Guo, Matthew J. Bridges, Spyridon Triantafyllis, Guilherme Ottoni, Easwaran Raman, David I. August
• Keywords: CGO 2005, Low-level Pointer Analysis, Pointer Analysis, Software Engineering, Subsequent Code Transformations