A New Approach to Pointer Analysis for Assignments

Pointer analysis is a technique to identify at compile-time the potential values of the pointer expressions in a program, which promises significant benefits for optimizing and parallelizing compilers. In this paper, a new approach to pointer analysis for assignments is presented. In this approach, assignments are classified into three categories: pointer assignments, structure (union) assignments and normal assignments which don't affect the point-to information. Pointer analyses for these three kinds of assignments respectively make up the integrated algorithm. When analyzing a pointer assignment, a new method called expression expansion is used to calculate both the left targets and the right targets. The integration of recursive data structure analysis into pointer analysis is a significant originality of this paper, which uniforms the pointer analysis for heap variables and the pointer analysis for stack variables. This algorithm is implemented in Agassiz, an analyzing tool for C programs developed by institute of Parallel Processing, Fudan University. Its accuracy and effectiveness are illustrated by experimental data.