Efficient flow-sensitive interprocedural data-flow analysis in the presence of pointers

Abstract

This paper presents a new worklist algorithm that significantly speeds up a large class of flow-sensitive data-flow analyses, including typestate error checking and pointer analysis. Our algorithm works particularly well for inter-procedural analyses. By contrast, traditional algorithms work well for individual procedures but do not scale well to interprocedural analysis because they spend too much time unnecessarily re-analyzing large parts of the program. Our algorithm solves this problem by exploiting the sparse nature of many analyses. The key to our approach is the use of interprocedural def-use chains, which allows our algorithm to re-analyze only those parts of the program that are affected by changes in the flow values. Unlike other techniques for sparse analysis, our algorithm does not rely on precomputed def-use chains, since this computation can itself require costly analysis, particularly in the presence of pointers. Instead, we compute def-use chains on the fly during the analysis, along with precise pointer information. When applied to large programs such as nn, our techniques improve analysis time by up to 90% - from 1974s to 190s - over a state of the art algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.