[Wala-wala] Making the slicing "API" consistent

[Till Schlechtweg]

Hello all, hello Manu,

first of all thanks Manu for the help with my first problem. I can now
start to really dig in.

In the com.ibm.wala.ipa.slicer.Slicer exists a function:

computeBackwardSlice(SDG sg, Collection<Statement> ss)

is there any reason to not also have a function:

computeForwardSlice(SDG sg, Collection<Statement> ss)

if you need I can directly provide pull requests to these questions,
otherwise I would always first ask here.

Also is there any literature on TabluationProblems? They might be
interesting for me.

Big thanks from Germany,
Till



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[Manu Sridharan]

Hi there, I am very sorry for my slow response to this message.  I don’t think there is any fundamental reason why these APIs are asymmetric, though I haven’t thought deeply about it.  If it would be helpful to you, feel free to submit a PR with whatever slicing APIs would make your tasks easier and I can take a look.

Regarding tabulation problems, the approach was popularized in this POPL’95 paper:

https://research.cs.wisc.edu/wpis/papers/popl95.pdf

That paper’s algorithm is the basis for the tabulation solver in WALA.  There was also a paper on how it is implemented in Soot:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2259051.2259052

I don’t know of an overview paper listing practical static analysis problems solved with tabulation, but there are many of them.

Best,

Manu