Article

Pointer disambiguation via strict inequalities

Authors:

Vitor Paisante,

Fernando Magno Quintão PereiraAuthors Info & Claims

CGO '17: Proceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

Pages 134 - 147

Published: 04 February 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The design and implementation of static analyses that disambiguate pointers has 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 languages that 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 pointer is strictly less than another, they cannot alias. Motivated by this remark, we use abstract interpretation to build strict less-than relations between pointers. We construct a program representation that bestows the Static Single Information (SSI) property onto our dataflow analysis. SSI gives us a sparse algorithm, whose correctness is easy to ensure. We have implemented our static analysis in LLVM. It runs in time linear on the number of program variables, and, depending on the benchmark, it can be as much as six times more precise than the pointer disambiguation techniques already in place in that compiler.

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Cited By

Zyrianov VNewman CGuarnera DCollard MMaletic JGuéhéneuc YKhomh FSarro F(2019)srcPtrProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2019.00031(144-147)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2019.00031
Diarra RHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)Towards automatic restrictification of CUDA kernel argumentsProceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3241533(928-931)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3241533
Maalej MPaisante VMagno Quinto Pereira FGonnord L(2018)Combining range and inequality information for pointer disambiguationScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2017.10.014152:C(161-184)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2017.10.014

Pointer disambiguation via strict inequalities
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CGO '17: Proceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

February 2017

317 pages

ISBN:9781509049318

General Chair:
Vijay Janapa Reddi
University of Texas at Austin, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Aaron Smith
Microsoft Research, UK / University of Edinburgh, UK
,
Lingjia Tang
University of Michigan, USA

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages
SIGMICRO: ACM Special Interest Group on Microarchitectural Research and Processing
IEEE-CS: Computer Society

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IEEE Press

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Published: 04 February 2017

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CGO '17

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CGO '17: 15th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization

February 4 - 8, 2017

Austin, USA

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CGO '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 116 submissions, 22%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 312 of 1,061 submissions, 29%

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Cited By

Zyrianov VNewman CGuarnera DCollard MMaletic JGuéhéneuc YKhomh FSarro F(2019)srcPtrProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension10.1109/ICPC.2019.00031(144-147)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICPC.2019.00031
Diarra RHuchard MKästner CFraser G(2018)Towards automatic restrictification of CUDA kernel argumentsProceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3238147.3241533(928-931)Online publication date: 3-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3238147.3241533
Maalej MPaisante VMagno Quinto Pereira FGonnord L(2018)Combining range and inequality information for pointer disambiguationScience of Computer Programming10.1016/j.scico.2017.10.014152:C(161-184)Online publication date: 15-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.scico.2017.10.014

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