• Paper: IncSFS: Incremental Full-Sparse Flow-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for C/C++

    From John R Levine@johnl@taugh.com to comp.compilers on Wed Aug 26 12:59:34 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.compilers

    Flow-sensitive pointer analysis is very effective but also very expensive.
    This paper proposes a way to make it a lot cheaper.

    Unlike a lot of recent papers, this one has nothing to do with LLMs.

    Abstract
    Pointer analysis is a fundamental technique for compiler optimization and program analysis. Flow-sensitive pointer analysis provides high precision
    but is difficult to scale to large projects. Tailored for rapid iteration scenarios where software evolves continuously, we introduce IncSFS, the
    first incremental full-sparse flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm
    for C/C++ programs. IncSFS first transforms the value-flow graph into a constraint graph and performs strongly connected component detection to
    ensure precision. It then propagates increases and decreases in points-to
    sets in an interleaved manner, supporting code deletion and insertion
    within a single analysis pass. IncSFS is guaranteed to terminate and
    compute the least fixed point when the points-to relation remains object-acyclic during analysis. Experiments on six large-scale real-world projects show that IncSFS is precise and efficient, achieving average
    speedups of 9.60x over full flow-sensitive pointer analysis and 5.84x over
    the traditional reset-recompute approach. It also improves efficiency by
    15.8% over state-of-the-art incremental pointer analysis algorithms that propagate points-to-set changes.

    https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.24391

    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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