Rethinking Incremental and Parallel Pointer Analysis

Pointer Analysis for Stru tured Parallel

Pointer Analysis

Pointer analysis is a fundamental static program analysis, with a rich literature and wide applications. The goal of pointer analysis is to compute an approximation of the set of program objects that a pointer variable or expression can refer to. We present an introduction and survey of pointer analysis techniques, with an emphasis on distilling the essence of common analysis algorithms. To thi...

Interprocedural Pointer Analysis for C Interprocedural Pointer Analysis for C

Interprocedural pointer analysis provides information on the values pointer variables may have at various points in a program. It is especially useful in languages like C, where pointers are extensively used. This analysis does not improve code directly but is used by other optimizations. This paper presents a framework in which to perform pointer analysis. Basic questions that any pointer anal...

Rethinking Overspecification in Terms of Incremental Processing

Speakers often overspecify their referring descriptions by including more information than what is required to uniquely distinguish a referent. Although overspecification has received a substantial amount of attention, the factors that play a role in determining this behaviour are not yet well understood. Given evidence of cross-linguistic difference between English and Spanish regarding oversp...

Exploiting Pointer and Location Equivalence to Optimize Pointer Analysis

Pointer information is a prerequisite for most program analyses, and inclusion-based, i.e. Andersen-style, pointer analysis is widely used to compute such information. However, current inclusion-based analyses can have prohibitive costs in time and space, especially for programs with millions of lines of code. We present a suite of offline optimizations that exploit pointer and location equival...