JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 18(20): 2851-2878, doi: 10.3217/jucs-018-20-2851
Points-to Analysis: A Fine-Grained Evaluation
expand article infoJonas Lundberg, Welf Löwe§
‡ Linnaeus University, Växö, Sweden§ Linnaeus University and Softwerk AB, Växö, Sweden
Open Access
Abstract
Points-to analysis is a static program analysis that extracts reference information from programs, e.g., possible targets of a call and possible objects referenced by a field. Previous works evaluating different approaches to context-sensitive Pointsto analyses use coarse-grained precision metrics focusing on references between source code entities like methods and classes. Two typical examples of such metrics are the number of nodes and edges in a call-graph. These works indicate that context-sensitive analysis with a call-depth k = 1 only provides slightly better precision than contextinsensitive analysis. Moreover, these works could not find a substantial precision improvement when using the more expensive analyses with call-depth k
Keywords
static program analysis, points-to analysis, context sensitivity