Basile STARYNKEVITCH (CEA LIST)

   Infrastructure for Global Static Analysis in GCC 


This talk describes work in progress on an infrastructure to add
global static analysis to the GCC compiler (within the GlobalGCC
project funded by the ITEA programme).


The motivation of this work is to provide global (whole program) static
analysis, notably based upon abstract interpretation and knowledge
based techniques, within the GCC compiler, targeted for analysis of
medium sized C, Fortran or C++ programs.

In this perspective, the emphasis is on the quality of analysis, at
the expense of much bigger compilation times, without sacrificing
scalability. Such analysis can be used for several purposes
statically compute some interesting properties of the program at most
control points (possibly reporting them the user); provide clever,
contextual, warnings about possible hazards ; enable additional
contextual optimisations.

To facilitate the development high-level semantical analyses, a domain
specific language is been developped, and is translated (thru C) into
dynamically loaded code. It uses the Parma Polyhedra Library (also
used in the GRAPHITE project) for relational analysis on scalars and
gives more expressivity to develop analaysis algorithms. It permits
multi-staged generation of the specific analysis tailored to the
analyzed source code. A compiler probe facility has also been
developped.