On the importance, problems and solutions of pointer synthesis

A feature of C/C⁺⁺ that is particularly difficult to synthesize is the concept of a pointer. In hardware, a pointer is not necessarily an index into RAM memory (as is the case in software), but it may also reference a port, a wire or a register. This paper gives an overview of the different problems that are involved in pointer synthesis and explains, compares and evaluates some solutions to these problems. Also, we present techniques to handle some of the problems presented, such as typecasted pointers.