[Soot-list] New option -no-bodies-for-excluded for Soot

[Heejong Lee]

I got it. Thanks for the clear explanation.

- Heejong

On Friday, June 4, 2010, Eric Bodden
<bodden at st.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de> wrote:
> Hello.
>
>> But what's the difference between following two options?
>> 1. Use -allow-phantom-refs and remove JDK classes from Soot's class path
>> 2. Use -no-bodies-for-excluded, add JDK classes to Soot's class path
>> (as we usually did) and add JDK classes to -exclude
>
> Ok, let me try to explain.
>
> Option 1 will not include any information at all about JDK classes.
> (There can be no such information because the JDK is not even on the
> classpath.) This can be problematic because then the analysis even
> misses the entire type hierarchy of java.lang classes etc. For
> instance, consider a method with a try/catch block that catches
> RuntimeExceptions. To conduct its exception analsyis and construct a
> correct control-flow graph for this method, Soot needs to know that
> RuntimeException is a sub-type of Throwable, etc. With Option 1, this
> won't work properly.
>
> Option 2 *will* include JDK classes (and other excluded classes), but
> it will only include hierarchy and signature information for those.
> Now when analyzing a class C that uses such excluded classes, Soot
> will be able to analyze this class correctly, because it has all the
> necessary information about the signatures of outgoing method calls
> and field accesses, and hierarchy information too. But at the same
> time, because we load no bodies for excluded classes, Soot will not
> consider any method calls that the excluded classes themselves
> contain. This speeds up the analysis dramatically.
>
> Hope that helps,
> Eric
>

-- 
Heejong Lee

Associate Research Engineer
Program Analysis Division
Fasoo.com, Inc. (www.spa-arrow.com)