Context-sensitive interprocedural points-to analysis in the presence of function pointers

Abstract

This paper reports on the design, implementation, and empirical results of a new method for dealing with the aliasing problem in C. The method is based on approximating the points-to relationships between accessible stack locations, and can be used to generate alias pairs, or used directly for other analyses and transformations. Our method provides context-sensitive interprocedural information based on analysis over invocation graphs that capture all calling contexts including recursive and mutually-recursive calling contexts. Furthermore, the method allows the smooth integration for handling general function pointers in C. We illustrate the effectiveness of the method with empirical results from an implementation in the McCAT optimizing/parallelizing C compiler.