A probabilistic pointer analysis for speculative optimizations

Pointer analysis is a critical compiler analysis used to disambiguate the indirect memory ref-erences that result from the use of pointers and pointer-based data structures. A conventional pointer analysis deduces for every pair of pointers, at any program point, whether a points-to relation between them (i) definitely exists, (ii) definitely does not exist, or (iii) maybe exists. Many compiler optimizations rely on accurate pointer analysis, and to ensure correctness can-not optimize in the maybe case. In contrast, recently-proposed speculative optimizations can aggressively exploit the maybe case, especially if the likelihood that two pointers alias could be quantified. This dissertation proposes a Probabilistic Pointer Analysis (PPA) algorithm that statically predicts the probability of each points-to relation at every program point. Building on simple control-flow edge profiling, the analysis is both one-level context and flow sensitive—yet can still scale to large programs