[cfe-dev] Possible bug in check::RegionChanges

[Devin Coughlin via cfe-dev]

> On Sep 19, 2016, at 10:33 AM, Krzysztof Wiśniewski via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I've been working on new checker that registers for region change update. Together with Artem Dergachev, we noticed that the function
> wantsRegionChangeUpdate never seems to be called. The heavy work necessary to fill data structures for checkRegionChanges is being done regardless of it in ProgramState::invalidateRegionsImpl. The documentation for checkRegionChanges says the following:
> "Note that this callback will not be invoked unless wantsRegionChangeUpdate returns true"
>  and for wantsRegionChangeUpdate:
> "Since it is not necessarily cheap to compute which regions are being changed, this allows the analyzer core to skip the more expensive  checkRegionChanges when no checkers are tracking any state." 
> 
> My question is whether someone can confirm that this is indeed an invalid behavior? For me it looks like it used to work differently and at some point someone changed the logic rendering wantsRegionChangeUpdate useless.

Interesting. It looks like Anna removed the call in to wantsRegionChangeUpdate() in r170625 when adding the checkPointerEscape callback. It also looks to me like the code path in ProgramState::invalidateRegionsImpl that doesn’t call processRegionChanges() may be completely dead.

> If this indeed is a bug, I suggest we might wish to consult CheckerManager  in ProgramState::invalidateRegionsImpl  whether there is some one checker registered for an update and only then prepare the input data in order to improve performance.

I think we would still need to call invalidateRegions() on the store manager to actually invalidate the transitively reachable regions, so any savings would be in not filling in the ‘out’ parameters TopLevelInvalidated and Invalidated. I’m not sure skipping this will actually result in any significant performance gains. You could try it and see — but I wonder if the better thing to do here might be to remove the wantsRegionChangeUpdate callback from the checker API.

Devin
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