Building a whole-program type analysis in Eclipse

Eclipse has the potential to become a widely-used platform for implementation and dissemination of various static analyses for Java. In order to realize this potential, it is important to understand the challenges for building high-quality static analyses in Eclipse. This paper discusses some of these challenges in the context of the Tacle plug-in for wholeprogram type analysis and call graph construction. In particular, we argue that the treatment of the standard Java libraries should be an important concern for static analysis builders. Our experiments indicate that it may be necessary to use pre-computed summary information for the libraries, in order to improve the scalability of whole-program analyses for Eclipse. The experience described in this paper could be beneficial for static analysis researchers who use Eclipse as the infrastructure for their analysis implementations. 1