Interprocedural modification side effect analysis with pointer aliasing

Abstract

We present a new interprocedural modification side effects algorithm for C programs, that can discern side effects through general-purpose pointer usage. Ours is the first complete design and implementation of such an algorithm. Preliminary performance findings support the practicality of the technique, which is based on our previous approximation algorithm for pointer aliases [LR92]. Each indirect store through a pointer variable is found, on average, to correspond to a store into 1.2 locations. This indicates that our program-point-specific pointer aliasing information is quite precise when used to determine the effects of these stores.