Improving Side-Effect Analysis with Lazy Access Path Resolving

For scalability, many side-effect analysis methods choose inclusion-based context-insensitive (IBCI) pointer analysis as their basis. However, such a pointer analysis is known to be imprecise, which often results in over-conservative side-effect sets. In this paper, we present a lightweight approach that exploits lazy access path resolving to improve the precision of side-effect analysis under IBCI pointer analysis. The approach partly represents and propagates side-effects in the access path form with the help of interstatement must aliases. All access paths can finally be resolved to the accessed locations, but during the side-effect propagation phase, an access path will never be resolved as long as it could be mapped to another access path in the caller. Since in inclusion-based points-to analysis, points-to sets of variables in the callers tend to be smaller than the ones in the callees, such lazy resolving mechanism can lead to more precision. The experimental results show that the lazy access path resolving approach is effective in improving the precision of IBCI pointer analysis based side-effect analysis methods.