Aspect-Aware Points-to Analysis

Abstract

Points-to analysis is a fundamental analysis technique whose results are useful in compiler optimization and software engineering tools. Although many points-to analysis algorithms have been proposed for procedural and object-oriented languages like C and Java, there is no points-to analysis for aspect-oriented languages so far. Based on Andersen-style points-to analysis for Java, we propose flow- and context-insensitive points-to analysis for AspectJ. The main idea is to perform the analysis crossing the boundary between aspects and classes. Therefore, our technique is able to handle the uniqueaspectual features. To investigate the effectiveness of our technique, we implement our analysis approach on top of the ajc AspectJ compiler and evaluate it on nine AspectJ benchmarks. The experimental result indicates that, compared to existing Java approaches, the proposed technique can achieve a significant higher precision and run in practical time and space.