Treffer: On-demand dynamic summary-based points-to analysis

Static analyses can be typically accelerated by reducing redundancies. Modern demand-driven points-to or alias analysis techniques rest on the foundation of Context-Free Language (CFL) reachability. These techniques achieve high precision efficiently for a small number of queries raised in small programs but may still be too slow in answering many queries for large programs in a contextsensitive manner. We present an approach, called DYNSUM, to perform context-sensitive demand-driven points-to analysis fully on-demand by means of computing CFL-reachability summaries without any precision loss. The novelty lies in initially performing a Partial Points-To Analysis (PPTA) within a method, which is field-sensitive but context-independent, to summarize its local points-to relations encountered during a query and reusing this information later in the same or different calling contexts. We have compared DYNSUM with REFINEPTS, a refinement-based analysis, using three clients (safe casting, null dereferencing and factory methods) for a suite of nine Java programs. DYNSUM’s average speedups are 1.95, 2.28 and 1.37, respectively. We have also compared DYNSUM with a static approach, which is referred to STASUM here, to show its improved scalability for the same three clients.