Static analyses can be typically accelerated by reducing redundancies. Modern demand-driven points-to or alias analysis techniques rest on the foundation of Context-Free Language (CFL) reachability. These techniques achieve high precision efficiently for a small number of queries raised in small programs but may still be too slow in answering many queries for large programs in a context-sensitive manner.

We describe our preliminary experience in the design and implementation of a points-to analysis for Java, called EMU, that enables developers to perform pointer-related queries in programs undergoing constant changes in IDEs. EMU achieves fast response times by adopting a modular approach to incrementally updating method summaries upon small code changes: the points-to information in a method is summarised indirectly by CFL reachability rather than directly by points-to sets. Thus, the impact of a small code change made in a method is localised, requiring only its affected part to be re-summarised just to reflect the change. EMU achieves precision by being context-sensitive (for both method invocation and heap abstraction) and field-sensitive. Our evaluation shows that EMU can be promisingly deployed in IDEs where the changes are small.