Adaptive Context-sensitive Analysis for JavaScript

Context sensitivity is a technique to improve program analysis precision by distinguishing between function calls. A specific context-sensitive analysis is usually designed to accommodate the programming paradigm of a particular programming language. JavaScript features both the objectoriented and functional programming paradigms. Our empirical study suggests that there is no single context-sensitive analysis that always produces precise results for JavaScript applications. This observation motivated us to design an adaptive analysis, selecting a context-sensitive analysis from multiple choices for each function. Our two-staged adaptive context-sensitive analysis first extracts function characteristics from an inexpensive points-to analysis and then chooses a specialized context-sensitive analysis per function based on the heuristics. The experimental results show that our adaptive analysis achieved more precise results than any single contextsensitive analysis for several JavaScript programs in the benchmarks. 1998 ACM Subject Classification D.3.4 Processors, F.3.2 Semantics of Programming Languages, D.2.5 Testing and Debugging