2019 EuroLLVM Developers’ Meeting: K. Umann “Resolving the almost decade old checker dependency ...”

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Resolving the almost decade old checker dependency issue in the Clang Static Analyzer - Kristóf Umann (Ericsson Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University)

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As checkers grew in numbers in the Static Analyzer, the problem of certain checkers depending on one another was inevitable. One particular problem, for example, is that a checker called MallocChecker, which despite its name does all sorts of memory allocation and de- or reallocation related checks, depends on CStringChecker to model calls to strcmp. While these checkers are completely separate entities, the Static Analyzer also contains large checker classes that in fact expose multiple checkers to the user: For example, IteratorChecker has a modeling part, and it exposes 3 iterator related checkers, and enabling any of the three will also enable the unexposed modeling part. Having both of these structures makes it difficult to find a solution where the developer (or the experienced user) can easily see what checkers are enabled, as these dependencies are only expressed in the implementation.

This talk is going to discuss elegant solutions as to how these rather fragile checker structures can be preserved by declaring these dependencies in TableGen files, how checker developers (and users) can ensure that when the analyzer is invoked, only the requested checkers will be enabled, and also take a very brief look at what other features the analyzer gained thanks to these issues being resolved.
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