[cfe-dev] GSoC - Static Analyzer project ideas?

[Martin Milata]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 09:02:00 -0500, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> On 03/21/2011 08:18 AM, Ben Laurie wrote:
> >On 21 March 2011 12:05, Martin Milata<b42-ml at srck.net>  wrote:
> >>Hello,
> >>
> >>I would like to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code
> >>program. I'm interested in working on the Static Analyzer, because I
> >>think it has great potential to be a tool that a lot of programmers can
> >>benefit from, and it also overlaps with my academic interests.
> >>
> >>The analyzer is not mentioned on the open projects page, so my question
> >>is if anybody has some project idea and/or is willing to mentor it?
> >Sadly I don't think I'm qualified to mentor, or I would certainly
> >offer. I like your list (not so sure about dynamic loading, that seems
> >low priority).
> >
> >One I'd like to add is some kind of support for rule-based finding of
> >particular known bad patterns (e.g. the OpenSSL bug where return
> >values that could be -1, 0 or 1 were checked as if they were
> >true/false). Yes, this is vague :-)
> >
> I'm not a mentor candidate either but have tried to use
> clang to analyse RTEMS (http://www.rtems.org).  We had
> some issues with RTEMS always being cross built and
> some noise from system header files.  All in all, I recall
> enough not working that we didn't get far.
> 
> I'd been happy to be a tester for you and provide more
> details on the issues we had.  It should all be in the
> mailing list log.

>From what I understood from the list log, it seems to be general clang
cross-compilation issue. I think that you cannot run the analyzer on
something you cannot compile with clang.

However, Ted's reply suggests another possible project:
> (1) Support transparent integration into almost any build system on most
> platforms.
> (2) Support different workflows with processing analysis results other
> than generating static HTML reports.
I didn't think of that, because the scan-build script seemed to work
pretty well, at least on Linux.

> >>I
> >>have tried to come up with something, but I don't know if it would be
> >>really possible, useful and doable in the given time:
> >>
> >>- support for interprocedural analysis
> >>
> >>- support for external checkers (i.e. loadable at runtime, so clang does
> >>  not have to be recompiled in order to use new checker)
> >>
> >>- false positive elimination with constraint solver (klee seems to
> >>  contain a solver that could be specifically used for this)
> >>
> >>- C++ support (only thing mentioned on the analyzer web, I don't have an
> >>  idea of extent of the work needed)
> >>
> >>Thank you for any feedback,
> >>Martin Milata
> >>_______________________________________________
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> >>cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
> >>http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
> >>
> >_______________________________________________
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research&  Development
> joel.sherrill at OARcorp.com        On-Line Applications Research
> Ask me about RTEMS: a free RTOS  Huntsville AL 35805
>    Support Available             (256) 722-9985
> 
>