Getting precise alias information in a language that allows pointers, such as C, is expensive. One reason is that alias analysis should generate conservative (safe) alias information. Alias analysis assumes possible aliases when it can’t prove there are no aliases. The conservative alias information may greatly affect compiler optimizations. In this paper, we present a general framework to allo...

In this research-in-progress report, we elaborate on the alias calculus introduced in [1], [2]. The alias calculus is to determine whether two reference expressions at the given program point may address the same object at the run-time (in other words, whether one expression may be an alias of the other expression). The main intended application of the alias calculus is to support deductive ver...

Aliasing is endemic in object oriented programming. Because an object can be modified via any alias, object oriented programs are hard to understand, maintain, and analyse. Flexible alias protection is a conceptual model of inter-object relationships which limits the visibility of changes via aliases, allowing objects to be aliased but mitigating the undesirable effects of aliasing. Flexible al...

Type-based alias analyses allow C compilers to infer that memory locations of distinct types do not alias. Idiomatic reliance on pointers on the one hand, and separate compilation on the other hand, together make it impossible to get this aliasing information any other way. As a consequence, most modern optimizing C compilers implement some sort of type-based alias analysis. Unfortunately, poin...

We propose a flow-sensitive context-insensitive alias analysis in Java that is more efficient and precise than previous analyses in C++. For that, we propose a reference-set alias representation. Second, we present the propagation rules for the reference-set alias representation. Third, for the type determination, the type table is built with reference variables and all possible types of the re...

While prior work has proposed a number of algorithms for computing aliases in C programs[5][6][7], there has been relatively little evaluation of these algorithms[1]. This paper proposes an interface that gives standard dataflow analysis and visualization clients access to “may alias” and “must alias” results produced by multiple alias analysis implementations. The clients can use this abstract...

We study the application of a standard model checker tool, Spin, to the well-known problem of computing a may-alias relation for a C program. A precise may-alias relation can significantly improve code optimization, but in general it may be computationally too expensive. We show that, at least in the case of intraprocedural alias analysis, a model checking tool has a great potential for precisi...