Precise and Scalable Pointer Analysis

Title of the Talk: Precise and Scalable Pointer Analysis
Speaker: Prof. Uday Khedker
Host Faculty: Dr.Jyothi Vedurada
Date: Friday, 13th February 2026
Time: 2:00 pm
Venue: CS-LH3

Abstract The world of programming is divided in religious camps with opposing views on the use of pointers. The verification community as well as HPC community abhors pointers while the hackers adore them. Compiler writers love the convenience that pointers provide to build fancy data structures but hate the difficulties that arise in trying to optimize a program containing pointers.

There has been a lot of work on analyzing programs containing pointers. The mathematics of pointer analysis has been studied in great details and the findings conclusively say that like many other interesting problems, the analysis of pointers in its full glory is undecidable and remains intractable even if some imprecision were to be tolerated. Given the vital importance of pointer analysis and the inherent difficulty of performing precise pointer analysis for practical programs, a large fraction of pointer analysis community has come to believe that compromising on precision is necessary for scalability and efficiency. This is evidenced by the fact that a large number of reported investigations in pointer analysis involve a significant amount of engineering approximations.

We find it hard to accept this assumption as the final inevitability. For over a decade, we are working towards a grand goal of fully flow-, field-, and context-sensitive points-to analysis of a million lines of C programs in tens of minutes. In this talk we describe some interesting work being done at IIT Bombay in this direction and invite students to be a part of our journey towards realizing our dreams.

Bio

Prof. Uday Khedker from IIT Bombay.