Who are you not gonna call? : a definitive comparison of Java static call graph creator tools

Pengő, Edit and Ságodi, Zoltán and Kóbor, Ervin: Who are you not gonna call? : a definitive comparison of Java static call graph creator tools. Conference of PhD Students in Computer Science, (11). pp. 68-71. (2018)

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Abstract

Call graphs are fundamental for advanced, interprocedural control flow and data flow analysis tasks. In dynamic languages like Java, which allows polymorphism and reflection constructing a static call graph can be complicated. A missing or imprecisely connected edge might misguide the following algorithms causing errors in the overall analysis. In this paper, we have collected six static analyzer tools for Java and performed a qualitative comparison on the call graph they generate. As part of the comparison, we introduced a method for pairing different notations of the same functions. We evaluated the collected tools on three open-source Java projects and on a small example containing most of the relevant Java language features. The results revealed several language structures that were handled differently by the static analyzers, which led to a difference in the created call graphs as well.

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