Thread-Sensitive Pointer Analysis for Inter-Thread Dataflow Detection

Inter-thread dataflows are of great importance in analyzing concurrent programs. Suffering from the complexity of currency, it is still difficult to identify them from Java programs precisely and efficiently. A fundamental problem in inter-thread dataflow analysis is pointer analysis. Currently, pointer analyses can be classified into context-sensitive ones and context-insensitive ones. They are either too time consuming or too imprecise and hence not suitable for scalable and high precision inter-thread dataflow analysis. To change the situation, this paper proposes a thread-sensitive pointer analysis algorithm which only uses sequences of thread starts as calling contexts. As in inter-thread dataflow analysis, the major objective is analyzing interthread dataflows not intra-thread ones, the coarse-grained context-sensitivity can not only effectively speed up the analysis, but also preserve the analyze precision as much as possible