Shape analysis with reference set relations

  • Authors:

  • Mark Marron;Rupak Majumdar;Darko Stefanovic;Deepak Kapur

  • Affiliations:

  • IMDEA-Software;University of California Los Angeles;University of New Mexico;University of New Mexico

  • Venue:
  • VMCAI'10 Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Tracking subset relations between the contents containers on the heap is fundamental to modeling the semantics of many common programing idioms such as applying a function to a subset of objects and maintaining multiple views of the same set of objects. We introduce a relation, must reference sets, which subsumes the concept of must-aliasing and enables existing shape analysis techniques to efficiently and accurately model many types of containment properties without the use of explicit quantification or specialized logics for containers/sets. We extend an existing shape analysis to model the concept of reference sets. Reference sets allow the analysis to efficiently track a number of important relations (must-=, and must-⊆) between objects that are the targets of sets of references (variables or pointers). We show that shape analysis augmented with reference set information is able to precisely model sharing for a range of data structures in real programs that cannot be expressed using simple must-alias information. In contrast to more expressive proposals based on logic languages (e.g., extensions of first-order predicate logic with transitive closure or the use of a decision procedure for sets), reference sets can be efficiently tracked in a shape analyzer.