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Scalable Flow-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for Java with Strong Updates

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ECOOP 2012 – Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7313))

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Abstract

The ability to perform strong updates is the main contributor to the precision of flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithms. Traditional flow-sensitive pointer analyses cannot strongly update pointers residing in the heap. This is a severe restriction for Java programs. In this paper, we propose a new flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm for Java that can perform strong updates on heap-based pointers effectively. Instead of points-to graphs, we represent our points-to information as maps from access paths to sets of abstract objects. We have implemented our analysis and run it on several large Java benchmarks. The results show considerable improvement in precision over the points-to graph based flow-insensitive and flow-sensitive analyses, with reasonable running time.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India

    Arnab De & Deepak D’Souza

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  1. Arnab De
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  2. Deepak D’Souza
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  1. School of Engineering and Computer Science, Victoria University of Wellington, 6140, Wellington, New Zealand

    James Noble

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De, A., D’Souza, D. (2012). Scalable Flow-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for Java with Strong Updates. In: Noble, J. (eds) ECOOP 2012 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7313. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_29

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31056-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31057-7

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