Application-only call graph construction

Abstract

Since call graphs are an essential starting point for all inter-procedural analyses, many tools and frameworks have been developed to generate the call graph of a given program. The majority of these tools focus on generating the call graph of the whole program (i.e., both the application and the libraries that the application depends on). A popular compromise to the excessive cost of building a call graph for the whole program is to ignore all the effects of the library code and any calls the library makes back into the application. This results in potential unsoundness in the generated call graph and therefore in any analysis that uses it. In this paper, we present Cgc, a tool that generates a sound call graph for the application part of a program without analyzing the code of the library. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.