Comparison of Points-to Analyses

Abstract: Points-to analysis is a static program analysis which computes possible reference relations between different parts of a program. It serves as input to many high-level analyses. Points-to analyses differ, among others, in flow- and context-sensitivity, program representation, and object abstraction. Most program representations used for points-to analysis are sparse representations which abstract from, e.g., primitive data types and intra-procedural control-flow. Thus, a certain degree of information is sacrificed for compact program representation, which results in scalable performance. In this thesis, we present a framework which allows building different versions of Points-to SSA (P2SSA), a sparse, Memory SSA based program representation. Distinct instantiations of P2SSA contain different levels of abstraction from a program's full representation. We present another framework which allows running Points-to analyses on these program representations. We use these two frameworks to instantiate different versions of P2SSA and compare them in terms of analysis precision and execution time.