Study On Inter-Procedural Analysis Techniques In The Presence Of Pointer Aliasing

Pointer analysis is a field of active research in recent years in compiler technology. The extensive use of pointers in languages such as C greatly affects the accuracy of data flow analysis which further affects the result of program optimization and program transformation. As the emerging computer architecture design requires more supports from compilers to exploit the ample hardware resources, the affection of pointer in the object code efficiency is more severe. Pointer analysis is hence becoming one of the most important components in modern compiler technology.Comparing with the traditional analysis method, this paper adopts a new inter-procedural strategy to handle pointers. Our inter-procedural strategy is based on the abstraction of C's parameterized name space. We developed a context-sensitive inter-procedural pointer analysis algorithm because the program contexts are limit in the parameterized name space. One one hand, the algorithm is context-sensitive and provides very precise result, on the other hand, the algorithm is very efficient because we carefully apply heuristic techniques.Based on the result of pointer analysis and the abstraction of parameterized name space, we developed a unified inter-procedural framework which integrated the basic inter-procedural problems include pointer analysis, call graph construction, inter-procedural MOD analysis and Reach Definition analysis construction. This framework provides a promising efficient method for solving C's inter-procedural problems.The result of this research has been applied to a real optimizing and parallelizing compiler for a SIMD chip. The benchmarking and actual use of this compiler proves that our inter-procedural analysis is practical and efficient. This makes the work in this paper beyond pure academic research.