A Practical Escape and Effect Analysis for Building Lightweight Method Summaries

Abstract. We present a unification-based, context-sensitive escape and effect analysis that infers lightweight method summaries describing heap effects. The analysis is parameterized on two values: k, indicating the heap depth beyond which objects escape; and b, a branching factor indicating the maximum number of fields per object that the analysis precisely tracks. Restricting these parameters to small values allows us to keep the method summaries lightweight and practical. Results collected from our implementation shows that the analysis scales well to large code bases such as the GNU Classpath libraries. They also show that summaries can help analysis clients approximate the effects of method calls, avoiding expensive inter-procedural computations, or imprecise worst-case assumptions.