Compositional pointer and escape analysis for Java programs

  • Authors:

  • John Whaley;Martin Rinard

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper presents a combined pointer and escape analysis algorithm for Java programs. The algorithm is based on the abstraction of points-to escape graphs, which characterize how local variables and fields in objects refer to other objects. Each points-to escape graph also contains escape information, which characterizes how objects allocated in one region of the program can escape to be accessed by another region. The algorithm is designed to analyze arbitrary regions of complete or incomplete programs, obtaining complete information for objects that do not escape the analyzed regions.We have developed an implementation that uses the escape information to eliminate synchronization for objects that are accessed by only one thread and to allocate objects on the stack instead of in the heap. Our experimental results are encouraging. We were able to analyze programs tens of thousands of lines long. For our benchmark programs, our algorithms enable the elimination of between 24% and 67% of the synchronization operations. They also enable the stack allocation of between 22% and 95% of the objects.