Name: Relaxing Alias Analysis - Exploring the Unexplored Space
Start: 2025-05-28T18:45:00+02:00
End: 2025-05-28T21:00:00+02:00
Location: ETH CAB G51

Michel is joining us to talk about his work that he will be presenting at PLDI'25.

As usual there will be pizza, snacks, beer, and soft drinks after the event for participants, sponsored by NextSilicon.

**Astract:** Alias analysis is a fundamental compiler analysis that powers numerous optimizations. While research has focused on deriving more precise alias information assuming that the compiler will optimize better, recent work shows a negligible, or even negative, performance impact of alias information. In this work, we shift the perspective from refining to relaxing alias information, i.e., removing information, to complement existing work and challenge that assumption systematically. Our study on a state-of-the-art compiler, LLVM, running the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark suite, shows (1) a small overall impact—removing alias analysis entirely has little impact on the final binaries, (2) few influential queries—only a small fraction, namely ∼3%, of the alias information leads to changes in the final binary, and (3) lost potential—random relaxations can reduce execution time by 21% and binary size by 39% for certain cases, suggesting that compilers could better utilize alias information. Through this work, we advocate that it is beneficial for future research to avoid simply refining the general precision of alias analysis, but also to explore how to find and refine the most relevant queries, and how to more effectively utilize alias information.

**Location:** The event is taking place in the room G51 in the CAB building of ETH Zurich at the Zentrum campus. Enter from Universitätstrasse 6.

Johannes de Fine Licht

Tobias Gysi

lorenzo chelini

Michel Weber

Compiler Social Zürich

LLVM Project

Technology

Open Source

Software Development

C & C++

Programming Languages

Computer Programming

Compilers

Relaxing Alias Analysis - Exploring the Unexplored Space

ETH CAB G51

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Compiler Social Zürich

Relaxing Alias Analysis - Exploring the Unexplored Space

Compiler Social Zürich

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