Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis via graph reachability
POPL '95 Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis with applications to constant propagation
TAPSOFT '95 Selected papers from the 6th international joint conference on Theory and practice of software development
Experimental Comparison of call string and functional Approaches to Interprocedural Analysis
CC '99 Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Compiler Construction, Held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on the Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS'99
A static analyzer for large safety-critical software
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Cloning-based context-sensitive pointer alias analysis using binary decision diagrams
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2004 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Refinement-based context-sensitive points-to analysis for Java
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
The trace partitioning abstract domain
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) - Special Issue ESOP'05
An improved bound for call strings based interprocedural analysis of bit vector frameworks
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
CC'08/ETAPS'08 Proceedings of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software 17th international conference on Compiler construction
Taming false alarms from a domain-unaware c analyzer by a bayesian statistical post analysis
SAS'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Static Analysis
An algorithmic mitigation of large spurious interprocedural cycles in static analysis
Software—Practice & Experience
Access analysis-based tight localization of abstract memories
VMCAI'11 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Verification, model checking, and abstract interpretation
Contribution-based call stack abstraction for call string based pointer analysis
Information and Software Technology
Access-Based localization with bypassing
APLAS'11 Proceedings of the 9th Asian conference on Programming Languages and Systems
Sound non-statistical clustering of static analysis alarms
VMCAI'12 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation
Design and implementation of sparse global analyses for C-like languages
Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
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We present a simple algorithmic extension of the classical call-strings approach to mitigate substantial performance degradation caused by spurious interprocedural cycles. Spurious interprocedural cycles are, in a realistic setting, key reasons for why approximate call-return semantics in both context-sensitive and -insensitive static analysis can make the analysis much slower than expected. In the traditional call-strings-based context-sensitive static analysis, because the number of distinguished contexts must be finite, multiple call-contexts are inevitably joined at the entry of a procedure and the output at the exit is propagated to multiple return-sites. We found that these multiple returns frequently create a single large cycle (we call it "butterfly cycle") covering almost all parts of the program and such a spurious cycle makes analyses very slow and inaccurate. Our simple algorithmic technique (within the fixpoint iteration algorithm) identifies and prunes these spurious interprocedural flows. The technique's effectiveness is proven by experiments with a realistic C analyzer to reduce the analysis time by 7%-96%. Since the technique is algorithmic , it can be easily applicable to existing analyses without changing the underlying abstract semantics, it is orthogonal to the underlying abstract semantics' context-sensitivity, and its correctness is obvious.