Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Necula, George C.
• McPeak, Scott
• Rahul, Shree P.
• Weimer, Westley
• Horspool, R. Nigel

Titel

CIL: Intermediate Language and Tools for Analysis and Transformation of C Programs

Ist Teil von

• Compiler Construction, 2002, p.213-228

Ort / Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Erscheinungsjahr

2002

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This paper describes the C Intermediate Language: a highlevel representation along with a set of tools that permit easy analysis and source-to-source transformation of C programs. Compared to C, CIL has fewer constructs. It breaks down certain complicated constructs of C into simpler ones, and thus it works at a lower level than abstract-syntax trees. But CIL is also more high-level than typical intermediate languages (e.g., three-address code) designed for compilation. As a result, what we have is a representation that makes it easy to analyze and manipulate C programs, and emit them in a form that resembles the original source. Moreover, it comes with a front-end that translates to CIL not only ANSI C programs but also those using Microsoft C or GNU C extensions. We describe the structure of CIL with a focus on how it disambiguates those features of C that we found to be most confusing for program analysis and transformation. We also describe a whole-program merger based on structural type equality, allowing a complete project to be viewed as a single compilation unit. As a representative application of CIL, we show a transformation aimed at making code immune to stack-smashing attacks. We are currently using CIL as part of a system that analyzes and instruments C programs with run-time checks to ensure type safety. CIL has served us very well in this project, and we believe it can usefully be applied in other situations as well.