Eecient Flow-sensitive Interprocedural Computation of Pointer-induced Aliases and Side Eeects

We present practical approximation methods for computing interprocedural aliases and side eeects for a program written in a language that includes pointers, reference parameters and recursion. We present the following results: 1) An algorithm for ow-sensitive interprocedural alias analysis which is more precise and eecient than the best inter-procedural method known. 2) An extension of traditional ow-insensitive alias analysis which accommodates pointers and provides a framework for a family of algorithms which trade oo precision for eeciency. 3) An algorithm which correctly computes side eeects in the presence of pointers. Pointers cannot be correctly handled by conventional methods for side eeect analysis. 4) An alias naming technique which handles dynamically allocated objects and guarantees the correctness of data-ow analysis. 5) A compact representation based on transitive reduction which does not result in a loss of precision and improves precision in some cases. 6) A method for intraprocedural alias analysis which is based on a sparse representation .