Abstract
Most scalable approaches to inter-procedural dataflow analysis do not take into account the order in which fields are accessed, and methods are executed, at run-time. That is, they have no inter-procedural flow-sensitivity. In this chapter we present an approach to dataflow analysis named Simulated Execution. It is flow-sensitive in the sense that a memory accessing operation (call or field access) will never be affected by another memory access that is executed thereafter in all runs of a program. This makes Simulated Execution strictly more precise than the most frequently used flow-insensitive approaches. We also outline a proof of correctness using abstract interpretation. Finally, although we present Simulated Execution as a dataflow algorithm applied to context-insensitive Points-to Analysis, it can be applied on any inter-procedural dataflow problem and in a context-sensitive manner.
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Lundberg, J., Hedenborg, M., Löwe, W. (2012). SSA-Based Simulated Execution. In: Breitman, K., Horspool, R. (eds) Patterns, Programming and Everything. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2350-7_7
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