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Polymorphic versus Monomorphic Flow-Insensitive Points-To Analysis for C

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Static Analysis (SAS 2000)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 1824))

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Abstract

We carry out an experimental analysis for two of the design dimensions of flow-insensitive points-to analysis for C: polymorphic versus monomorphic and equality-based versus inclusion-based. Holding other analysis parameters fixed, we measure the precision of the four design points on a suite of benchmarks of up to 90,000 abstract syntax tree nodes. Our experiments show that the benefit of polymorphism varies significantly with the underlying monomorphic analysis. For our equality-based analysis, adding polymorphism greatly increases precision, while for our inclusion-based analysis, adding polymorphism hardly makes any difference. We also gain some insight into the nature of polymorphism in points-to analysis of C. In particular, we find considerable polymorphism available in function parameters, but little or no polymorphism in function results, and we show how this observation explains our results.

This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award No. CCR-9457812, NASA Contract No. NAG2-1210, an NDSEG fellowship, and an equipment donation from Intel.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California Berkeley, 387 Soda Hall #1776, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Jeffrey S. Foster & Alexander Aiken

  2. Microsoft Research, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    Manuel Fähndrich

Authors
  1. Jeffrey S. Foster
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  2. Manuel Fähndrich
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  3. Alexander Aiken
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

    Jens Palsberg

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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Foster, J.S., Fähndrich, M., Aiken, A. (2000). Polymorphic versus Monomorphic Flow-Insensitive Points-To Analysis for C. In: Palsberg, J. (eds) Static Analysis. SAS 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1824. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45099-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45099-3_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67668-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45099-3

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