Re: Heap pointers

shrey wrote:


> I am looking for simple ways to detect if for a pointer
> dereference, the particular pointer is heap pointer or otherwise. I
> know doing this at compile time is the whole world of alias
> analaysis which is still a big research topic. What I am instead
> looking for is simple, low cost, heuristics which can either at
> compile time or at run time tell me conservatively if a pointer is a
> non heap pointer. Any pointers or idead would be great.


Just a question:


Pointers frequently are passed to subroutines, do you think that it's
"cheap" to determine all possible callers of such a subroutine, and
the classes of all possible targets of those pointers?


I fear that you'll end up in real programs with very few pointers of
class "heap" or "non-heap", and with a real mass of class "either" :-(


IMO it would be more practical to add a "heap" pointer attribute to
the language, so that the parser/compiler can detect incompatible
assignments to such pointers.


DoDi
[I suspect it's more practical to do it at runtime like GCs all do.
PL/I sort of had heap-only pointers with CONTROLLED storage but I
don't get the impression that it was very popular. -John]

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.