Abstract

Static type determination involves compile time calculation of the type of object a pointer may point to, at a particular program point during some execution. We show that the problem of precise interprocedural type determination is NP-hard in the presence of inheritance, virtual functions and pointers. We highlight the significance of type determination in improving code efficiency and precision of other static analyses. First we present a safe, approximate type determination algorithm for C++ programs with single level pointers, using the conditional analysis technique [LR91]. Then we present a generalization of this approach to simultaneously solve the aliasing and type determination problems for C++ programs with multiple levels of pointer dereferencing, and explain why this is a more complicated analysis.

Citations