Lightweight Analysis of Acyclic Unshared Lists

We describe a simple analysis for tracking properties such as may-aliasing, memory leaks, and disjointness for programs manipulating singly-linked lists. We restrict the set of programs we consider to ones that manipulate acyclic and unshared lists. We benefit from these restrictions in terms of simplicity and efficiency of the algorithm. We demonstrate that most common list-manipulating programs satisfy the above restrictions or can be locally transformed to meet the requirements. Our algorithm successfully answers may-aliasing, memory leak and disjointness queries for these programs. The analysis also allows us to prove interesting summary content properties that relate the contents of a set of input lists to a procedure with the content of lists returned