Practical Points-to Analysis for Programs Built with Libraries

Traditional whole-program analysis cannot be directly applied to programs that include precompiled libraries. Such programs could be analyzed separately from the included libraries by using precomputed summary information about each library. This paper describes one such separate analysis derived from Andersen’s wholeprogram points-to analysis [2]. The analysis uses a summary which is a compact representation of the points-to effects of all statements in the library. The summary is generated by substituting some of the library variables with placeholder variables. By replacing many variables with the same placeholder, we can reduce the size of the summary and the cost of the separate analysis. We use a substitution which summarizes the library effects without losing precision or exposing the internals of the library. Our experiments show that the cost of computing and storing the summary is practical, and that the substitution technique significantly reduces the cost of the separate analysis.