Demand-driven analysis of pointers for software program analysis and debugging

摘要

A "Demand-Driven Pointer Analyzer" (DDPA) provides a "demand-driven" field-sensitive pointer analysis process. This process rapidly and accurately identifies alias sets for selected pointers in software modules or programs of any size, including large-scale C/C++ programs such as a complete operating system (OS). The DDPA formulates the pointer analysis task as a Context-Free Language (CFL) reachability problem that operates using a Program Expression Graph (PEG) automatically constructed from the program code. The PEG provides a node and edge-based graph representation of all expressions and assignments in the program and allows the DDPA to rapidly identify aliases for pointers in the program by traversing the graph as a CFL reachability problem to determine pointer alias sets. In various embodiments, the DDPA is also context-sensitive.