Flow-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for Millions of Lines of Code

Many program analyses benefit, both in precision and performance, from precise pointer analysis. An important dimension of pointer analysis precision is flow-sensitivity, which has been shown to be useful for applications such as program verification and static analysis of binary code, among many others. However, flow-sensitive pointer analysis has historically been unable to scale to programs with millions of lines of code. The authors present a new flow-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm that is an order of magnitude faster than the existing state of the art, enabling for the first time flow-sensitive pointer analysis for programs with millions of lines of code.