Pointer Disambiguation via Strict Inequalities

Abstract

International audienceThe design and implementation of static analyses that disambiguate pointershas been a focus of research since the early days of compiler construction.One of the challenges that arise in this context is the analysis of languagesthat support pointer arithmetics, such as C, C++ and assembly dialects.This paper contributes to solve this challenge.We start from an obvious, yet unexplored, observation: if a pointeris strictly less than another, they cannot alias.Motivated by this remark, we use the abstract interpretation framework tobuild strict less-than relations between pointers.To this end, we construct a program representation that bestows the StaticSingle Information (SSI) property onto our dataflow analysis.SSI gives us an efficient sparse algorithm, which, once seen as aform of abstract interpretation, is correct by construction.We have implemented our static analysis in LLVM.It runs in time linear on the number of program variables, and, depending onthe benchmark, it can be as much as six times more precise than the pointerdisambiguation techniques already in place in that compiler