Putting Pointer Analysis to Work

This paper addresses the problem of how to apply pointer analysis to a wide variety of compiler applications. We are not presenting a new pointer analysis. Rather, we focus on putting two existing pointer analyses, points-to analysis and connection analysis, to work. We demonstrate that the fundamental problem is that one mustbe ableto comparethe memorylocations read/written via pointer indirections, at di erent program points, and one must also be able to summarize the e ect of pointer references over regions in the program. It is straightforward to compute read/write sets for indirections involving stack-directed pointers using points-to information. However, for heap-directed pointers we show that one needs to introduce the notion of anchor handles into the connection analysis and then express read/write sets to the heap with respect to these anchor handles. Based on the read/write sets we show how to extend traditional optimizations like common subexpression elimination, loop-inva...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Rakesh Ghiya, Laurie J. Hendren
• Keywords: Pointer Analysis, Pointer References, POPL 1998, Programming Languages, Read/write Sets