Demand-Driven Memory Leak Detection Based on Flow- and Context-Sensitive Pointer Analysis

We present a demand-driven approach to memory leak detection algorithm based on flow- and context-sensitive pointer analysis. The detection algorithm firstly assumes the presence of a memory leak at some program point and then runs a backward analysis to see if this assumption can be disproved. Our algorithm computes the memory abstraction of programs based on points-to graph resulting from flow- and context-sensitive pointer analysis. We have implemented the algorithm in the SUIF2 compiler infrastructure and used the implementation to analyze a set of C benchmark programs. The experimental results show that the approach has better precision with satisfied scalability as expected.