Global Dynamic Slicing for the C Language

In dynamic program slicing, program subsets are computed that represent the set of dependences that occur for specific program executions and can be associated with a program point of interest called the slicing criterion. Traditionally, dynamic dependence graphs are used as a preprocessing step before the actual slices are computed, but this approach is not scalable. We follow the approach of processing the execution trace and, using local definition-use information, follow the dependence chains “on the fly” without actually building the dynamic dependence graph, but we retain specialized data structures. Here, we present in detail the practical modifications of our global dynamic slicing algorithm, which are needed to apply it to programs written in the C language.

Keywords: program slicing; dynamic slicing; program analysis; program dependence; C