Devirtualization for static analysis with low level intermediate representation

Abstract

We propose a points-to analysis that can recover targets for function pointer calls, virtual calls and method calls for using in a static analysis. We use a flow-insensitive analysis, and the analysis results are intended for flow- and path-sensitive analysis which can improve the initial analysis precision within a single function. We implemented the proposed approach in a static analyzer for finding errors in C, C++, Go, Java and Kotlin programs. The devirtualization algorithm is fast enough and spends less than 6% of the total analysis time. It can work for projects like Tizen 7 with 27.5 MLoc of source code.