Practical and Accurate Low-Level Pointer Analysis

A brief overview

Pointer Analysis is essential for Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) optimizations in the presence of memory operations. Traditionally, pointer analysis is performed once, early in the compilation process, on a high-level intermediate representation (IR). The analysis result is then annotated on the IR and must be conservatively maintained by subsequent code transformations. This imposes a phase-ordering constraint, causing the precision of alias information to be diluted by code transformation. Moreover, high-level pointer analysis cannot be used at link time or run time, where the source code is unavailable. To overcome these limitations, we design and implement a pointer analysis that operates at the assembly level in the Velocity compiler.

To learn more about Velocity Low-Level Pointer Analysis (VLLPA)...

• See the VLLPA Brochure.