Effects of Different Flow Insensitive Points-to Analyses
on DEF/USE Sets
Abstract
Points-to analysis is required as a preliminary step for many code
analyses used in program understanding and maintenance. Different flow
insensitive points-to analyses have been proposed
in literature. They are extremely appealing with respect to the flow
sensitive counterparts because of their high efficiency. Their output,
consisting of a set of points-to pairs which hold for the given program,
can be integrated with other analyses, such as reaching definitions or call
graph computation. In any case, their role is to resolve dereference chains
into the referenced locations.
In this paper two variants of flow insensitive points-to analysis are
considered. The resulting points-to pairs are used to determine the
locations that are defined or used by every program statement. When a
definition or a use exploits a pointer to access the defined or used
location, the preliminarly computed points-to pairs allow to find out the
accessed locations. The effect of different choices of points-to analyses
on DEF/USE sets is discussed in this paper, together with the consequences
on the efficiency of the computation.
Postscript version of the paper.
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