Efficient Field-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for C

Author(s). David J. Pearce, Paul H.J. Kelly and Chris Hankin.

Venue. In Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE), pages 37--42, 2004. ©ACM Press

Abstract: The subject of this paper is flow- and context-insensitive pointer analysis. We present a novel approach for precisely modelling struct variables and indirect function calls. Our method emphasises efficiency and simplicity and extends the language of set-constraints. We experimentally evaluate the precision cost trade-off using a benchmark suite of 7 common C programs between 5,000 to 150,000 lines of code. Our results indicate the field-sensitive analysis is more expensive to compute, but yields significantly better precision.