Field-Sensitive Value Analysis by Field-Insensitive Analysis

Abstract

Shared and mutable data-structures pose major problems in static analysis and most analyzers are unable to keep track of the values of numeric variables stored in the heap. In this paper, we first identify sufficient conditions under which heap allocated numeric variables in object oriented programs (i.e., numeric fields) can be handled as non-heap allocated variables. Then, we present a static analysis to infer which numeric fields satisfy these conditions at the level of (sequential) bytecode. This allows instrumenting the code with ghost variables which make such numeric fields observable to any field-insensitive value analysis. Our experimental results in termination analysis show that we greatly enlarge the class of analyzable programs with a reasonable overhead