Symbolic pointer analysis

— One of the bottlenecks in the recent movement of hardware synthesis from behavioral C programs is the difficulty in reasoning about runtime pointer values at compile time. The pointer analysis problem has been investigated in the compiler community for two decades, which has yielded efficient, polynomial time algorithms for context-insensitive analysis. However, at the accuracy level for which hardware synthesis is desired, namely context and flow sensitive analysis, the time and space complexity of the best algorithms reported grow exponentially with program size. In this paper, we propose a new analysis technology to combat the in-efficiency encountered in traditional algorithms. The key idea is to implicitly encode the pointer-to relation in the Boolean domain by Bryant’s Binary Decision Diagram, thereby capturing the procedure transfer function completely, compactly and canonically. With symbolic transfer functions, we can establish a common framework to perform both cont...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Jianwen Zhu
• Keywords: Context-sensitive Pointer Analysis, Hardware, ICCAD 2002, Pointer Analysis Problem, Runtime Pointer Values