Pointer analysis is one of the fundamental problems in static program analysis. Given a set of pointers, the task is to produce a useful over-approximation of the memory locations that each pointer may point-to at runtime. The most common formulation is Andersen’s Pointer Analysis (APA), defined as an inclusion-based set of
m
pointer constraints over a set of
n
pointers. Scalability is extremely important, as points-to information is a prerequisite to many other components in the static-analysis pipeline. Existing algorithms solve APA in
O
(
n
2
·
m
) time, while it has been conjectured that the problem has no truly sub-cubic algorithm, with a proof so far having remained elusive. It is also well-known that APA can be solved in
O
(
n
2
) time under certain sparsity conditions that hold naturally in some settings. Besides these simple bounds, the complexity of the problem has remained poorly understood.
In this work we draw a rich fine-grained and parallel complexity landscape of APA, and present upper and lower bounds. First, we establish an
O
(
n
3
) upper-bound for general APA, improving over
O
(
n
2
·
m
) as
n
=
O
(
m
). Second, we show that even on-demand APA (“may a specific pointer
a
point to a specific location
b
?”) has an Ω(
n
3
) (combinatorial) lower bound under standard complexity-theoretic hypotheses. This formally establishes the long-conjectured “cubic bottleneck” of APA, and shows that our
O
(
n
3
)-time algorithm is optimal. Third, we show that under mild restrictions, APA is solvable in Õ(
n
ω
) time, where ω<2.373 is the matrix-multiplication exponent. It is believed that ω=2+
o
(1), in which case this bound becomes quadratic. Fourth, we show that even under such restrictions, even the on-demand problem has an Ω(
n
2
) lower bound under standard complexity-theoretic hypotheses, and hence our algorithm is optimal when ω=2+
o
(1). Fifth, we study the parallelizability of APA and establish lower and upper bounds: (i) in general, the problem is P-complete and hence unlikely parallelizable, whereas (ii) under mild restrictions, the problem is parallelizable. Our theoretical treatment formalizes several insights that can lead to practical improvements in the future.