Exception analysis and points-to analysis: better together

13 years 11 months ago

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Exception analysis and points-to analysis are typically done in complete separation. Past algorithms for precise exception analysis (e.g., pairing throw clauses with catch statements) use precomputed points-to information. Past points-to analyses either unsoundly ignore exceptions, or conservatively compute a crude approximation of exception throwing (e.g., considering an exception throw as an assignment to a global variable, accessible from any catch clause). We show that this separation results in signiﬁcant slowdowns or vast imprecision. The two kinds of analyses are interdependent: neither can be performed accurately without the other. The interdependency leads us to propose a joint handling for performance and precision. We show that our exception analysis is expressible highly elegantly in a declarative form, and can apply to points-to analyses of varying precision. In fact, our speciﬁcation of exception analysis is “fully precise”, as it models closely the Java exceptio...

Martin Bravenboer, Yannis Smaragdakis

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