Efficient alias set analysis using SSA form

  • Authors:

  • Nomair A. Naeem;Ondrej Lhoták

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada;University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 international symposium on Memory management
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Precise, flow-sensitive analyses of pointer relationships often represent each object using the set of local variables that point to it (the alias set), possibly augmented with additional predicates. Many such analyses are difficult to scale due to the size of the abstraction and due to flow sensitivity. The focus of this paper is on efficient representation and manipulation of the alias set. Taking advantage of certain properties of static single assignment (SSA) form, we propose an efficient data structure that allows much of the representations of sets at different points in the program to be shared. The transfer function for each statement, instead of creating an updated set, makes only local changes to the existing data structure representing the set. The key enabling properties of SSA form are that every point at which a variable is live is dominated by its definition, and that the definitions of any set of simultaneously live variables are totally ordered according to the dominance relation. We represent the variables pointing to an object using a list ordered consistently with the dominance relation. Thus, when a variable is newly defined to point to the object, it need only be added to the head of the list. A back edge at which some variables cease to be live requires only dropping variables from the head of the list. We prove that the analysis using the proposed data structure computes the same result as a set-based analysis. We empirically show that the proposed data structure is more efficient in both time and memory requirements than set implementations using hash tables and balanced trees.