Pick your contexts well: understanding object-sensitivity

ensitivity has emerged as an excellent context abstraction for points-to analysis in object-oriented languages. Despite its practical success, however, object-sensitivity is poorly understood. For instance, for a context depth of 2 or higher, past scalable implementations deviate significantly from the original definition of an object-sensitive analysis. The reason is that the analysis has many degrees of freedom, relating to which context elements are picked at every method call and object creation. We offer a clean model for the analysis design space, and discuss a formal and informal understanding of object-sensitivity and of how to create good objectsensitive analyses. The results are surprising in their extent. We find that past implementations have made a sub-optimal choice of contexts, to the severe detriment of precision and performance. We define a “full-object-sensitive” analysis that results in significantly higher precision, and often performance, for the exact s...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Yannis Smaragdakis, Martin Bravenboer, Ondrej Lhoták
• Keywords: Dynamic Types, Object Oriented Languages, POPL 2011, Programming Languages, Sensitive Analysis