[cfe-dev] Determining Static vs Dynamic Dispatch

[Gregory Malecha via cfe-dev]

Hello --

I'm working on a tool that gives a formal semantics to the clang C++
abstract syntax tree (the project is available here:
github.com/bedrocksystems/cpp2v). I'm working on adding support for virtual
functions and I'm trying to understand whether a call in the AST is a
static call or a dynamic call and I'm having difficulty figuring out how to
do it reliably. Here's a simple program:

struct A {
  virtual int foo() { return 100; }
};
struct B : public A {
  virtual int foo() { return 10; }
};
int test(B* b) {
  return b->foo() + b->B::foo();
}

>From what I understand (and what the compiler does) the left call
`b->foo()` uses dynamic dispatch to resolve `foo` in the most derived class
of the argument B. But the call on the right always calls B::foo (returning
10) regardless of the most derived class of B. However, I don't understand
what function I can call on the CXXMemberCallExpr node that
distinguishes these two cases. getMethodDecl, getRecordDecl, and
getImplicitObjectArgument all seem to return the exact same information.

How does clang differentiate between these two calls in order to get the
correct behavior?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

-- 
gregory malecha
gmalecha.github.io
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