NDLI: Precise Call Graphs for C Programs with Function Pointers

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Milava, Ana Rountev, Atanas Ryder, Barbara G.
Copyright Year	2004
Abstract	The use of pointers presents serious problems for software productivity tools for software understanding, restructuring, and testing. Pointers enable indirect memory accesses through pointer dereferences, as well as indirect procedure calls (e.g., through function pointers in C). Such indirect accesses and calls can be disambiguated with pointer analysis. In this paper we evaluate the precision of one specific pointer analysis (the FA pointer analysis by Zhang et al.) for the purposes of call graph construction for C programs with function pointers. The analysis is incorporated in a production-strength code-browsing tool from Siemens Corporate Research in which the program call graph is used as a primary tool for code understanding.The FA pointer analysis uses an inexpensive, almost-linear, flow- and context-insensitive algorithm. To measure analysis precision, we compare the call graph constructed by this analysis with the most precise call graph obtainable by a large category of existing pointer analyses. Surprisingly, for all our data programs the FA analysis achieves the best possible precision. This result indicates that for the purposes of call graph construction, inexpensive pointer analyses may provide precision comparable to the precision of expensive pointer analyses.
Starting Page	7
Ending Page	26
Page Count	20
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09288910
Journal	Automated Software Engineering
Volume Number	11
Issue Number	1
e-ISSN	15737535
Language	English
Publisher	Kluwer Academic Publishers
Publisher Date	2004-01-01
Publisher Place	Boston
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics)
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Software

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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