Tai-e: A Developer-Friendly Static Analysis Framework for Java by Harnessing the Good Designs of Classics

Static analysis is a mature field with applications to bug detection, security analysis, program understanding, optimization, and more. To facilitate these applications, static analysis frameworks play an essential role by providing a series of fundamental services such as intermediate representation (IR) generation, control flow graph construction, points-to/alias information computation, and so on. However, although static analysis has made great strides and several well-known frameworks have emerged in this field over the past decades, these frameworks are not that easy to learn and use for developers who rely on them to create and implement analyses. In that sense, it is far from trivial to build a developer-friendly static analysis framework, because compared to the knowledge required for static analysis itself, we have significantly less knowledge designing and implementing static analysis frameworks. In this work, we take a step forward by discussing the design trade-offs for the crucial components of a static analysis framework for Java, and select the designs by following the HGDC (Harnessing the Good Designs of Classics) principle: for each crucial component of a static analysis framework, we compare the design choices made for it (possibly) by different classic frameworks such as Soot, Wala, Doop, SpotBugs and Checker, and choose arguably a more appropriate one; but if none is good enough, we then propose a better design. These selected or newly proposed designs finally constitute Tai-e, a new static analysis framework for Java, which has been implemented from scratch. Tai-e is novel in the designs of several aspects like IR, pointer analysis and development of new analyses, etc., leading to a developer-friendly (easy-to-learn and easy-to-use) analysis framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that systematically explores the designs and implementations of various static analysis frameworks for Java. We expect it to provide useful materials and viewpoints for building better static analysis infrastructures, and we hope that it could draw more attentions of the community to this challenging but tangible topic.