Data-flow analysis of program fragments

  • Authors:

  • Atanas Rountev;Barbara G. Ryder;William Landi

  • Affiliations:

  • Rutgers Univ., Piscataway, NJ;Rutgers Univ., Piscataway, NJ;Siemens Corp. Research Inc., Princeton, NJ

  • Venue:
  • ESEC/FSE-7 Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Traditional interprocedural data-flow analysis is performed on whole programs; however, such whole-program analysis is not feasible for large or incomplete programs. We propose fragment data-flow analysis as an alternative approach which computes data-flow information for a specific program fragment. The analysis is parameterized by the additional information available about the rest of the program. We describe two frameworks for interprocedural flow-sensitive fragment analysis, the relationship between fragment analysis and whole-program analysis, and the requirements ensuring fragment analysis safety and feasibility. We propose an application of fragment analysis as a second analysis phase after an inexpensive flow-insensitive whole-program analysis, in order to obtain better information for important program fragments. We also describe the design of two fragment analyses derived from an already existing whole-program flow- and context-sensitive pointer alias analysis for C programs and present empirical evaluation of their cost and precision. Our experiments show evidence of dramatically better precision obtainable at a practical cost.