ACER: An AST-based Call Graph Generator Framework

TL;DR

ACER is a flexible, AST-based call graph generator framework that uses tree-sitter, enabling rapid and simple call graph creation across multiple languages, demonstrated through Java implementations.

Contribution

Introduces ACER, a novel AST-based framework for call graph generation that is adaptable to any language via tree-sitter, with practical Java implementations.

Findings

ACER outperforms existing Java call graph generators in speed and simplicity.

Framework demonstrates effective cross-language applicability.

Java generators created with ACER show competitive accuracy.

Abstract

We introduce ACER, an AST-based call graph generator framework. ACER leverages tree-sitter to interface with any language. We opted to focus on generators that operate on abstract syntax trees (ASTs) due to their speed and simplicitly in certain scenarios; however, a fully quantified intermediate representation usually provides far better information at the cost of requiring compilation. To evaluate our framework, we created two context-insensitive Java generators and compared them to existing open-source Java generators.