Abstract Slicing To Improve The Speed Of Static Program Analysis

When performing a static analysis, there is a trade-off between the time it takes to run the analysis and the quality of the results of the analysis. We propose to run the analysis on an abstract slice to reduce the size of the program to be analysed without impacting the results of the analysis. We adapt an abstract slicing algorithm to produce executable abstract slices that can be analysed using abstract interpretation. Next, we implement an intraprocedural abstract slicer for Scheme programs. We evaluate the implementation using a dataset of 1050 randomly generated Scheme programs. We find that abstract slices are in general smaller than their corresponding concrete slices and that in turn they are analysed faster. Additionally, we find that there is a significant difference between the abstract slices for two different abstract domains.