srcSlice: A Tool for Efficient Static Forward Slicing

An efficient lightweight forward static slicing tool is presented.The tool is implemented on top of srcML, an XML representation of source code.The approach does not compute the full program dependence graph but instead dependency information is computed as needed while computing the slice on a variable.The result is a list of line numbers, dependent variables, aliases, and function calls that are part of the slice for a given variable.The tool produces the slice for all variables in a system.The approach is highly scalable and can generate the slices for all variables of the Linux kernel in less than 15 minutes. A demonstration video is at: https://youtu.be/McvFUVSGg-g

1. Introduction

Program slicing is a widely used method for understanding and detecting the impact of changes to software. The idea is fairly simple; given a variable and the location of that variable in a program, tell me what other parts of the program are affected by this variable. Unfortunately, there are not any open-source slicing tools available that are scalable to large systems. While some free versions of commercial tools are available for academic use they are limited on the size of code base that can be analyzed. For example, the free version of CodeSurfer will not slice programs over 200KLOC.