[cfe-dev] virtual method calls in ctor/dtor

[David Blaikie]

If you're thinking of doing this as a Clang warning just a few thoughts

* it won't be interprocedural - that's just not practical at
compile-time. So you won't catch the indirect calls (dtor calls free
function foo, passing 'this, foo then calls virtual function on the
passed in pointer)
* you probably don't want/need the CFG - that's for path sensitive
analysis. In this case I don't think there's anything path-sensitive
you need to worry about, so you can probably just do this warning on
the fly - you see a call, you check whether we're currently parsing
the body of a dtor, then you check if it's a member call to the same
object (again, probably best to just catch simple cases like
"this->x()" or "x()" and not worry about "foo *f = this; ... f->x()")
* Getting such a warning into Clang has a somewhat high bar. We avoid
having warnings in Clang that have a high false positive (where "false
positive" is any case where the warning fires and the users code
doesn't have a bug, generally speaking) rate and I'm not sure if this
warning would meet that bar without some heuristics/improvements - but
I haven't given it much consideration just yet, perhaps you have ideas
there.

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 6:55 AM, Olaf Krzikalla
<Olaf.Krzikalla at tu-dresden.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> before I implement it by myself I'd rather ask. Maybe there is already a
> solution or it is not as simple as I thought.
> The question is, whether or not it is possible to implement a warning about
> direct or indirect calls to virtual methods within ctors or dtors.
> My approach would be to generate the cfg of the examined ctor/dtor and then
> traverse the execution paths and see if there is such a call. The
> interesting/difficult thing could be to keep track of the "this" pointer,
> since calls by other objects should not lead to such a warning.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Best Olaf
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>