Comparative Study of Andersen’s and Steensgaard’s Approaches of Pointer Analysis

Pointer analysis refers to finding out memory locations that are accessed in many ways. It is a static program analysis that gives the set of objects a pointer variable refers to. We present a comparative study of widely used various set of techniques that focus on, for a pointer, the possible set of memory location it will point to at runtime. More specifically, it is a compile time technique that resolves the issue of mapping of pointer variables to memory locations. This analysis has a variety of applications from bug detection, memory leak identification to performing other static analysis. Related techniques are points-to and alias analysis. Our work in this paper is a comparative study of many of the previous notable works related to pointer analysis