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International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning

IJCAR 2012: Automated Reasoning pp 423–438Cite as

Reachability Analysis of Program Variables

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7364))

Abstract

A variable v reaches a variable w if there is a path from the memory location bound to v to the one bound to w. This information is important for improving the precision of other static analyses, such as side-effects, field initialization, cyclicity and path-length, as well as of more complex analyses built upon them, such as nullness and termination. We present a provably correct constraint-based reachability analysis for Java bytecode. Our constraint is a graph whose nodes are program points and whose arcs propagate reachability information according to the semantics of bytecodes. The analysis has been implemented in the Julia static analyzer. Experiments that we performed on non-trivial Java and Android programs show a gain in precision due to a reachability information, whose presence also reduces the cost of nullness and termination analyses.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Verona, Italy

    Đurica Nikolić & Fausto Spoto

  2. Centre for Computational and Systems Biology, Microsoft Research - University of Trento, Italy

    Đurica Nikolić

Authors
  1. Đurica Nikolić
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  2. Fausto Spoto
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Fakultät für Informatik, Technische Universität Wien, Favoritenstr. 9, E185/2, 1040, Wien, Austria

    Bernhard Gramlich

  2. École Polytechnique, INRIA Saclay and Laboratoire d’Informatique, Route de Saclay, 91128, Palaiseau Cedex, France

    Dale Miller

  3. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

    Uli Sattler

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Nikolić, Đ., Spoto, F. (2012). Reachability Analysis of Program Variables. In: Gramlich, B., Miller, D., Sattler, U. (eds) Automated Reasoning. IJCAR 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7364. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31365-3_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31365-3_33

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31364-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31365-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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