Experiments with Combined Analysis for Pointer Aliasing

We present initial empirical experiments with combined analysis, a scalable analysis technique that uses a program decomposition to apply different aliasing algorithms to independent program segments. The effectiveness of the solution strategy is validated through application to side-effect and reference analysis of C programs. 1 Introduction For programming languages with general-purpose pointer usage (such as C), pointer aliasing is crucial to compiletime side-effect and semantic change analyses. It is also essential for software tool applications such as dataflow -based testing, debugging, semantics-based program understanding and program integration. Many techniques for pointer aliasing analysis have been presented in the literature. These analyses vary in the cost and precision of the aliasing information produced; their scalability is a difficult problem, as precision is usually sacrificed for acceptable cost on large programs. We have experimented with the application of alias..