Light-weight context recovery for efficient and accurate program analyses

  • Authors:

  • Donglin Liang;Mary Jean Harrold

  • Affiliations:

  • College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA;College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

To compute accurate information efficiently for programs that use pointer variables, a program analysis must account for the fact that a procedure may access different sets of memory locations when the procedure is invoked under different callsites. This paper presents light-weight context recovery, a technique that can efficiently determine whether a memory location is accessed by a procedure under a specific callsite. The paper also presents a technique that uses this information to improve the precision and efficiency of program analyses. Our empirical studies show that (1) light-weight context recovery can be quite precise in identifying the memory locations accessed by a procedure under a specific call-site and (2) distinguishing memory locations accessed by a procedure under different callsites can significantly improve the precision and the efficiency of program analyses on programs that use pointer variables.