Release 1.9, patchlevel 0

Official release date: 11/21/2003.

Summary

This release of CodeSurfer introduces several new features and some major improvements to the system. A new feature allows a user to compute a number of standard metrics for their project. The graphical user interface has changed considerably. The build process offers some major improvements in performance and scalability. Additionally, the user can choose from a wider range of build options.

This release offers some support for C++ programs. It can be thought of as an alpha release of CodeSurfer for C++. Although it can be used to build many C++ programs, it is incomplete in the following ways:

  • There are no library models for C++.
  • Support for exception handlers is weak.
  • The GUI does not present all of the available information in the best way.
  • Inlined functions can trigger performance and scalability problems.
  • It has not been fully tested on real-world C++ programs.

Major Features in CodeSurfer 1.9

  • Metrics
    CodeSurfer now allows users to compute a set of standard code metrics including the popular Halstead metrics, as well as cyclomatic complexity and a variety of line count metrics.
  • Library models
    CodeSurfer now builds all projects with library models by default. The standard installation ships with a set of pre-built library models. The library models themselves have been improved and are more complete than previously. A new option allows the user to suppress the display of vertices in library models.
  • GUI
    • Project Viewer. The project viewer now boasts a class view of the project as well as the original file view.
    • File Viewer. The file viewer now offers a single tabbed window with which to view all files. An optional column allows the display of line numbers.
    • Property Sheets. Most property sheets now show a tabbed view of the information associated with the selected item. A new tabular view of some of the properties allows information to be presented more compactly.
    • Preferences. The interface for setting user preferences and project settings is very much improved.
    • Popup menus. The performance of popup menus for large selections has been improved enormously.
    • Finder. The finder now offers a Find Type feature for locating the definitions or uses of a type.
    • Filtering. The filtering mechanism has been extended so that items originating in system include files and library models can be hidden.
  • Pointer Analysis
    • Inlining. A new set of options for adding a degree of context-sensitivity to the pointer analysis algorithm have been added. These work by treating some function calls as if they were inlined. Functions that have been identified as allocators are given special treatment, as these are especially important for the pointer analysis.
    • Hints. A new set of options for controlling the pointer analysis have been added. These allow the user to override the default conservative assumptions of the pointer analysis algorithms. Using these options may mean that the points-to graph may be incomplete.
  • Build option presets
    A new way of specifying sets of build options have been added. The user can choose lite, medium, high or highest. The lowest setting specifies little analysis, omitting pointer analysis and dependence analysis, and is useful for computing metrics, or for basic code browsing. This setting should scale easily to very large programs. The highest level specifies the most advanced analysis available. Due to the large quantity of computing resources required, it may fail to complete for large programs.
  • Support for MS DDKs
    Support for projects hosted under the Microsoft DDKs has been added.
  • Better support for MS Visual Studio projects
    The support for projects hosted under Microsoft Visual Studio (MSVS) has been improved substantially. CodeSurfer now supports all versions of MSVS. A new feature allows a user to import an MSVS .dsp file into CodeSurfer. The CodeSurfer Controller, which runs alongside MSVS and provides an integration with the MSVS build system, has been improved.
  • New customizable compiler model
    CodeSurfer now offers a generic compiler model, named xcc, which can be customized to allow CodeSurfer to model C compilers other than those directly modeled by CodeSurfer.
  • Diagnostics
    New diagnostic facilities have been added to improve our ability to diagnose problems with CodeSufer in the field.
  • Heap allocating functions
    CodeSurfer no longer replaces calls to allocator functions (such as malloc, calloc, etc.) with calls to synthetic heap-allocating functions. These functions, and the associated #heap variables are no longer created. Instead, the calls are treated as direct calls to the library model for the allocator, and the pointer analysis inlining takes care of assigning special names to the newly allocated memory regions. The user can now specify which functions are to be allocators and deallocators.
  • Unused inlined functions
    Functions that are specified as extern inline, but which are never called are now ignored and treated as dead code. This removes a large number of duplicate functions from projects.
  • Immutable preprocessor definitions
    CodeSurfer now allows users to specify C preprocessor macros that cannot be changed or undefined. This is useful for overriding definitions in standard header files that cause build problems.
  • GMOD/GREF
    It is now possible to view and manipulate the set of non-local variables used and defined by a procedure.
  • Inlining of glibc functions
    By default, the gcc compiler model now defines the __NO_INLINE__ preprocessor symbol. This prevents commonly-used functions such as strcpy from being inlined by the preprocessor. Previously, these were inlined to assembly language instructions, which resulted in CodeSurfer missing dependences because such instructions are not analyzed.

API/Representation Changes

There have been a large number of changes to the CodeSurfer API and to the dependence-graph representation. The most significant of these are described below. If you have written scripts for previous versions of CodeSurfer, and they no longer work with this version, then please feel free to contact us for assistance on adapting them.

  • SSA form
    CodeSurfer can now optionally compute the static single assignment (SSA) form of the control-flow graph.
  • Serialization
    A set of new functions have been added that allow serialization of PDG vertices to a persistent store. See serialize-data and deserialize-data.
  • Varargs
    The representation of the arguments of calls to variable arity functions has changed. Previously there was only one actual-in vertex representing all the arguments that corresponded to the single "..." formal-in vertex. Now there are as many actual-in vertices as there are actual parameters.
  • Normalization
    Many of the normalizations have been changed so as to decrease the number of temporary locations used. See the description of normalization for short-circuiting boolean expressions and conditional expressions.
  • $return variables
    The organization of vertices at call sites has changed. Previously a statement such as x=foo() was treated as follows:

        call foo();
        tmp = foo$return;
        x = tmp;
    where foo$return was an abstract variable representing the value returned from the function. Now, there is a variable foo$result for each call site. The above call is now treated as:

         call foo();
         x = foo$result;    ,

    where foo$result is a variable killed in the actual out vertex associated with the call site. Note that there is one $result variable for each call site, whereas previously there was one $return for each PDG that returned a value.
  • ABS_LOC API changes
  • ARRAY
    A new type for representing arrays of Scheme objects has been added.
  • AST API changes
    • The class formerly known as <edgcp-expr> has been renamed c:ast. The class formerly known as <edgcp-ast-proper> has been renamed to cc:ast.
    • A new function ast-for-uid returns the AST for a given compilation..
  • Bitwise operations API
    A handful of new bitwise operations for doing masking, shifting and rotation have been added.
  • INT_PAIR_SET API
    equal? and eqv? now work correctly for INT_PAIR_SET objects.
  • Miscellaneous API
    A new set of functions for manipulating files and for retrieving the system time have been added.
  • PDG API
    Several new functions have been added for retrieving information about PDGs. Some functions have changed slightly
  • SDG API
    The following functions are new, or have had their semantics changed:
    • (sdg-sccs) returns a list of the strongly-connected components of the call graph.
    • (sdg-retrieve-pdg pid) returns the PDG with the given unique id.
    • The function s-build-sdg-from-cfgs has a different signature.
    • The semantics of the functions s-predecessors, s-successors, f-pred and f-succ have all changed. They all take an extra optional integer parameter named threshold. The computation of the set is prematurely terminated if the size of the accumulated set reaches threshold. The return value can be used to extract the partial result.
  • SET_NATURAL API
    A new type for efficiently representing sets of natural numbers has been added.

Fixes

There have been too many bug fixes and other miscellaneous improvements to enumerate.


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