Whole-program analysis, but without the JDK (using Soot)
Eric | June 4, 2010
In the past many people have asked how they can configure Soot so that it would analyze a given set of classes, but without analyzing all the internals of the JDK. Of course, such an analysis is generally unsound, but often people don’t really care – they just want to have fast results. I have often found myself in the same situation when testing whole-program analyses that I wrote myself. Every analysis run would normally take minutes to run, which can cause your day to pass by quickly when you are debugging a complicated analysis.
Today I added a new option to Soot: -no-bodies-for-excluded. This option causes Soot to not load any method bodies of classes from the “exclude” packages (see –exclude option), even in whole-program mode, unless the class is explicitly as a “basic class”. -no-bodies-for-excluded implies -allow-phantom-refs, as it uses the phantom-refs mechanism to model classes that are not loaded.
All changes have been committed to SVN. This feature is still experimental, but it appears to work for me – I am now able to run all of Clara‘s tests in seconds each instead of minutes each, just because they now ignore JDK classes.
