Pointer Analysis – A Survey

Pointer analysis has been studied for over two decades. It answers the following question – For variables of pointer types, what are the set of objects they may point to at runtime. The analysis is also called Points-to analysis. Pointer analysis is used in a variety of applications, including live variable analysis for register allocation and constant propagation, static checking of potential runtime errors, such as NULL pointer dereferencing and for applications such as static schedulers that need to track resource allocations and usage precisely. In recent times it has been used in the context of detecting buffer overruns and print format string violations, that are known gateways that compromise security. Similar to other static techniques, pointer analysis is plagued by decidability issues and any solution found is always an approximation for most languages. This document describes the contributions of a set of papers on the subject. The first section describes the problem using an example. The second section gives some background material. The third outlines implementation choices. The fourth and fifth describe the contributions of two papers that take a novel approach to analyzing pointers. The sixth describes the contribution of a paper on a practical application of pointer analysis and is followed by a conclusion.