Re: GSoC: Working on the static analyzer

[Mir Immad <mirimnan017@gmail.com>]

Hi, sir.

I've been trying to understand the static analyzer's code. I spent most of
my time learning the state machine's API. I learned how state machine's
on_stmt is supposed to "recognize" specific functions and how on_transition
takes a specific tree from one state to another, and how the captured
states are used by pending_diagnostics to report the errors. Furthermore, I
was able to create a dummy checker that mimicked the behaviour of sm-file's
double_fclose and compile GCC with these changes. Is this the right way of
learning?

As you've mentioned on the projects page that you would like to add more
support for some POSIX APIs. Can you please write (or refer me to a) a
simple C program that uses such an API (and also what the analyzer should
have done) so that I can attempt to add such a checker to the analyzer.

Also, I didn't realize the complexity of adding SARIF when I mentioned it.
I'd rather work on adding more checkers.

Regards.

Mir Immad

On Sun, Jan 23, 2022, 11:04 PM Mir Immad <mirimnan017@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Sir,
>
> I've been trying to understand the static analyzer's code. I spent most of
> my time learning the state machine's API. I learned how state machine's
> on_stmt is supposed to "recognize" specific functions and takes a  specific
> tree from one state to another, and how the captured states are used by
> pending_diagnostics to report the errors. Furthermore, I was able to create
> a dummy checker that mimicked the behaviour of sm-file's double_fclose and
> compile GCC with these changes. Is this the right way of learning?
>
> As you've mentioned on the projects page that you would like to add more
> support for some POSIX APIs. Can you please write (or refer me to a) a
> simple C program that uses such an API (and also what the analyzer should
> have done) so that I can attempt to add such a checker to the analyzer.
>
> Also, I didn't realize the complexity of adding SARIF when I mentioned it.
> I'd rather work on adding more checkers.
>
> Regards.
> Mir Immad
>
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 5:41 AM David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2022-01-14 at 22:15 +0530, Mir Immad wrote:
>> > HI David,
>> > I've been tinkering with the static analyzer for the last few days. I
>> > find
>> > the project of adding SARIF output to the analyzer intresting. I'm
>> > writing
>> > this to let you know that I'm trying to learn the codebase.
>> > Thank you.
>>
>> Excellent.
>>
>> BTW, I think adding SARIF output would involve working more with GCC's
>> diagnostics subsystem than with the static analyzer, since (in theory)
>> all of the static analyzer's output is passing through the diagnostics
>> subsystem - though the static analyzer is probably the only GCC
>> component generating diagnostic paths.
>>
>> I'm happy to mentor such a project as I maintain both subsystems and
>> SARIF output would benefit both - but it would be rather tangential to
>> the analyzer - so if you had specifically wanted to be working on the
>> guts of the analyzer itself, you may want to pick a different
>> subproject.
>>
>> The SARIF standard is rather long and complicated, and we would want to
>> be compatible with clang's implementation.
>>
>> It would be very cool if gcc could also accept SARIF files as an
>> *input* format, and emit them as diagnostics; that might help with
>> debugging SARIF output.   (I have a old patch for adding JSON parsing
>> support to GCC that could be used as a starting point for this).
>>
>> Hope the above makes sense
>> Dave
>>
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jan 11, 2022, 7:09 PM David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > On Tue, 2022-01-11 at 11:03 +0530, Mir Immad via Gcc wrote:
>> > > > Hi everyone,
>> > >
>> > > Hi, and welcome.
>> > >
>> > > > I intend to work on the static analyzer. Are these documents
>> > > > enough to
>> > > > get
>> > > > started: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint and
>> > > >
>> > >
>> https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Analyzer-Internals.html#Analyzer-Internals
>> > >
>> > > Yes.
>> > >
>> > > There are also some high-level notes here:
>> > >   https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/DavidMalcolm/StaticAnalyzer
>> > >
>> > > Also, given that the analyzer is part of GCC, the more general
>> > > introductions to hacking on GCC will be useful.
>> > >
>> > > I recommend creating a trivial C source file with a bug in it (e.g.
>> > > a
>> > > 3-line function with a use-after-free), and stepping through the
>> > > analyzer to get a sense of how it works.
>> > >
>> > > Hope this is helpful; don't hesitate to ask questions.
>> > > Dave
>> > >
>> > >
>>
>>
>>