[llvm-dev] Question regarding LLVM 3.8 pointer analysis

[Zihao Liu via llvm-dev]

> On Apr 7, 2016, at 11:47 PM, Zihao Liu <zihaol1 at andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> My name is Zihao Liu, currently a computer science graduate student working on a LLVM project related to pointer analysis. I am using the LLVM 3.8 since it include some of the newer version of alias analysis (cfl-aa) that might be worthwhile to compare against our proposed method. I have a couple of questions regarding the pointer analysis using LLVM3.8.
> 
> 1. is there a good way to evaluate the default alias analysis? following the documentation, it seems that I can use aa-eval, but after I ran it using command line argument such as ./opt -[some]-aa -aa-eval … it always give me a consistent answer despite the fact that I am running it with different analysis. Also, is there a way to objectively quantify (say a baseline) the result of the aa-eval since it only output the value of precision from the analysis? how do I verify that the alias is indeed alias in LLVM?
> 2. how can I implement my own alias analysis in the current LLVM that can be invoked with ./opt -load ./MyOwnAA.so -myown-aa? I try to use the register analysis group but the API seems to changes from the documentation.
> 3. do I really need to use alias analysis to implement point-to pointer analysis? what is alias analysis mainly used for?
> 4. what type of benchmark can I run for the pointer analysis? I know there is a test-suite package but I also want to know if there are other options.
> 
> Thanks for your time.
> Zihao