Abstract

Abstract. This paper addresses the verification of properties of imperative programs withrecursive procedure calls, heap-allocated storage, and destructive updating of pointer-valued fields--i.e., interprocedural shape analysis. It presents a way to harness some previouslyknown approaches to interprocedural dataflow analysis--which in past work have been applied only to much less rich settings--for interprocedural shape analysis. 1 Introduction This paper concerns techniques for static analysis of recursive programs that manipulateheap-allocated storage and perform destructive updating of pointer-valued fields. The goal is to recover shape descriptors that provide information about the characteristicsof the data structures that a program's pointer variables can point to. Such information can be used to help programmers understand certain aspects of the program's behavior,to verify properties of the program, and to optimize or parallelize the program.

Citations