Hybrid top-down and bottom-up interprocedural analysis

Abstract

Interprocedural static analyses are broadly classified into top-down and bottom-up, depending upon how they compute, instantiate, and reuse procedure summaries. Both kinds of analyses are challenging to scale: top-down analyses are hindered by ineffective reuse of summaries whereas bottom-up analyses are hindered by inefficient computation and instantiation of summaries. This paper presents a hybrid approach Swift that combines top-down and bottom-up analyses in a manner that gains their benefits without suffering their drawbacks. Swift is general in that it is parametrized by the top-down and bottom-up analyses it combines. We show an instantiation of Swift on a type-state analysis and evaluate it on a suite of 12 Java programs of size 60-250 KLOC each. Swift outperforms both conventional approaches, finishing on all the programs while both of those approaches fail on the larger programs.