Side-effect analysis with fast escape filter

Side-effect analysis is a fundamental static analysis used to determine the memory locations modified or used by each program entity. For the programs with pointers, the analysis can be very imprecise. To improve the precision of side-effect analysis, many approaches design more elaborate background pointer analyses in order to obtain smaller side-effect sets, but very few approaches consider to achieve better precisions by refining the side-effect analysis algorithms themselves. To address the problem, this paper presents a new side-effect analysis approach that uses Gay and Steensgaard's fast escape analysis to filter superfluous side-effects. The approach does not need to modify the background pointer analysis and can filter side-effects in the intraprocedural level and the interprocedural level. The experimental results show that it can effectively improve the analysis precision within a short extra time.