Contribution-Based Call Stack Abstraction and Its Application in Pointer Analysis of AspectJ Programs

Different method calls may have different contributions to the precision of the final application when abstracted into the call strings. The existing call string based pointer analysis algorithms do not consider such contribution difference and hence often can not achieve best cost-effectiveness. To solve the problem, this paper firstly proposes a contribution-based call stack abstraction method which abstracts the call stacks to the call strings with the contribution information under consideration. Then, we apply the new call stack abstraction method to the pointer analysis of AspectJ programs and propose a concern-sensitive points-to analysis method. The concern-sensitive points-to analysis is more cost-effective than the ordinary call string based approaches for an application that detects harmful advices. It more concretely and more clearly shows that the contribution-based call stack abstraction can lead to better cost-effectiveness for the given applications.