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I am writing my master's thesis in CS and I am working with alias analysis. The thing that I am interested in is intraprocedural, flow sensitive must- and may-alias analysis for Java-like languages.

I am searching for texts that describe the basics of this subject in a detailed way but has been unable to locate anything really suitable.

I have survived a number of text books on compilers and static analysis but not found anything there.

I have found many papers where alias analysis is used, but most of them are focused on the problem to which alias analysis is applied and do not describe the alias analysis algorithms in detail. Others focus on C which is not suitably because of the added complexity of general pointers.

The best text I have found is the paper Compositional Pointer and Escape Analysis for Java Programs by Whaley and Rinard. It is a brilliant paper and a good starting point but it doesn't discuss alias analysis specifically.

The problem seems so general so I expected there to be some canonical algorithms available to solve it.

Does anyone have any pointers to texts on this subject?

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There's a very recent survey paper available on Alias Analysis for Object-Oriented Programs.

It will be published in April in the LNCS state-of-the-art volume (gratuitous advertising alert): Aliasing in Object-Oriented Programming: Types, Analysis and Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7850. Dave Clarke, Tobias Wrigstad, James Noble (Eds.)

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  • $\begingroup$ This seems interesting, thank you. The approach they describe doesn't seem to be spot on for my needs, but the paper might lead me to something else. $\endgroup$
    – Lii
    Commented Mar 6, 2013 at 15:39

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