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More Sound Static Handling of Java Reflection

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9458))

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Abstract

Reflection is a highly dynamic language feature that poses grave problems for static analyses. In the Java setting, reflection is ubiquitous in large programs. Any handling of reflection will be approximate, and overestimating its reach in a large codebase can be catastrophic for precision and scalability. We present an approach for handling reflection with improved empirical soundness (as measured against prior approaches and dynamic information) in the context of a points-to analysis. Our approach is based on the combination of string-flow and points-to analysis from past literature augmented with (a) substring analysis and modeling of partial string flow through string builder classes; (b) new techniques for analyzing reflective entities based on information available at their use-sites. In experimental comparisons with prior approaches, we demonstrate a combination of both improved soundness (recovering the majority of missing call-graph edges) and increased performance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In our context, sound = over-approximate, i.e., guaranteeing that all possible behaviors of reflection operations are modeled.

  2. 2.

    E.g., SMUSH_STRINGS in Wala [8] and MERGE_STRING_BUFFERS in Doop.

  3. 3.

    The +Backwards and +Invent techniques are both additions to the substring analysis, but neither includes the other.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge funding by the European Research Council under grant 307334 (Spade).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Yannis Smaragdakis, George Balatsouras & George Kastrinis

  2. LogicBlox Inc., Atlanta, GA, USA

    Martin Bravenboer

Authors
  1. Yannis Smaragdakis
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  2. George Balatsouras
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  3. George Kastrinis
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  4. Martin Bravenboer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yannis Smaragdakis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China

    Xinyu Feng

  2. Pohang Univ. of Science and Technology, Nam-Gu, Pohang, Korea (Republic of)

    Sungwoo Park

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Smaragdakis, Y., Balatsouras, G., Kastrinis, G., Bravenboer, M. (2015). More Sound Static Handling of Java Reflection. In: Feng, X., Park, S. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9458. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26529-2_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26529-2_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26528-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26529-2

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