General flow-sensitive pointer analysis and call graph construction

Abstract

Pointer analysis is a well known, widely used and very im-portant static program analyzing technique. After having studied theliterature in this field of research we found that most of the methodsapproach the problem in a flow-insensitive way, i.e. they omit the use ofthe control-flow information. Our goal was to develop a technique thatis flow-sensitive and can be used in the analysis of large programs. Dur-ing this process we have found that our method can give more accurateresults if we build the call graph and compute the pointer informationat the same time. In this paper we present two of our algorithms forpointer analysis and give some examples to help their comprehension. Inthe future these algorithms are planed to form the basis of a flow- andcontext-sensitive method used in the impact analysis of real life applica-tions.