Precise Dataflow Analysis of Event-Driven Applications

Abstract: Event-driven programming is widely used for implementing user interfaces, web applications, and non-blocking I/O. An event-driven program is organized as a collection of event handlers whose execution is triggered by events. Traditional static analysis techniques are unable to reason precisely about event-driven code because they conservatively assume that event handlers may execute in any order. This paper proposes an automatic transformation from Interprocedural Finite Distributive Subset (IFDS) problems to Interprocedural Distributed Environment (IDE) problems as a general solution to obtain precise static analysis of event-driven applications; problems in both forms can be solved by existing implementations. Our contribution is to show how to improve analysis precision by automatically enriching the former with information about the state of event handlers to filter out infeasible paths. We prove the correctness of our transformation and report on experiments with a proof-of-concept implementation for a subset of JavaScript.