A Novel Approach to Pointer Analysis

Abstract

Pointer analysis refers to finding out memory locations that are accessed in many ways. Related techniques are points-to and alias analysis. More specifically, it is a compile time technique that resolves the issue of mapping of pointer variables to memory locations. This analysis has variety of applications from bug detection, memory leak identification to performing other static analysis. Our work in this paper is towards a parallel version of pointer analysis. The basis of our approach is live variable analysis performed on individual basic blocks and then sharing information about live variables at the beginning and end of each block to reassess the set of memory locations pointed to by each pointer variable. We intend to implement this as a pass in gcc. Index Terms— Pointer Analysis, gcc, Points-to Analysis, Alias Analysis