Symbolic pointer analysis revisited

Pointer analysis is a critical problem in optimizing compiler, parallelizing compiler, software engineering and most recently, hardware synthesis. While recent efforts have suggested symbolic method, which uses Bryant’s Binary Decision Diagram as an alternative to capture the point-to relation, no speed advantage has been demonstrated for context-insensitive analysis, and results for context-sensitive analysis are only preliminary. In this paper, we refine the concept of symbolic transfer function proposed earlier and establish a common framework for both context-insensitive and context-sensitive pointer analysis. With this k, our transfer function of a procedure can abstract away the impact of its callers and callees, and represent its point-to information completely, compactly and canonically. In addition, we propose a symbolic representation of the invocation graph, which can otherwise be exponentially large. In contrast to the classical frameworks where context-sensitive point-...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Jianwen Zhu, Silvian Calman
• Keywords: Context-sensitive Pointer Analysis, PLDI 2004, Pointer Analysis, Programming Languages, Transfer Function