This post is jointly authored by Pascal Cuoq and John Regehr. Recently we’ve heard a few people imply that problems stemming from undefined behaviors (UB) in C and C++ are largely solved due to ubiquitous availability of dynamic checking tools such as ASan, UBSan, MSan, and TSan. We are here to state the obvious — […]
Category Archives: Compilers
Pointer Overflow Checking is in LLVM
Production-grade memory safety for legacy C and C++ code has proven to be a frustratingly elusive goal: plenty of research solutions exist but none of them appear to be deployable as-is. So instead, we have a patchwork of partial solutions such as CFI, ASLR, stack canaries, hardened allocators, and NX. Today’s quick post is about […]
Compiler Optimizations are Awesome
This piece, which I hadn’t gotten around to writing until now since I thought it was all pretty obvious, explains why Daniel J. Bernstein’s talk, The death of optimizing compilers (audio) is wrong, and in fact compiler optimizations are extremely wonderful and aren’t going anywhere. First, the thesis of the talk is that almost all […]
Translation Validation of Bounded Exhaustive Test Cases
This piece is jointly authored by Nuno Lopes and John Regehr. Compilers should be correct, but it is not straightforward to formally verify a production-quality compiler implementation. It is just too difficult to recover the high-level algorithms by looking at an enormous mess of arithmetic, loops, and memory side effects. One solution is to write […]
Taming Undefined Behavior in LLVM
Earlier I wrote that Undefined Behavior != Unsafe Programming, a piece intended to convince you that there’s nothing inherently wrong with undefined behavior as long as it isn’t in developer-facing parts of the system. Today I want to talk about a new paper about undefined behavior in LLVM that’s going to be presented in June […]
Do Expressive Programming Languages Always Have Undefined Behavior?
In the Hacker News comments on one of my previous posts about undefined behavior, someone said this: AFAIK Gödel’s incompleteness theorems imply that _any_ language will have at least some undefined behaviour. Let’s take a quick look at this statement, keeping in mind that incompleteness and undecidability can be remarkably tricky topics. Some years ago […]
Undefined Behavior != Unsafe Programming
Undefined behavior (UB) in C and C++ is a clear and present danger to developers, especially when they are writing code that will execute near a trust boundary. A less well-known kind of undefined behavior exists in the intermediate representation (IR) for most optimizing, ahead-of-time compilers. For example, LLVM IR has undef and poison in […]
Detecting Strict Aliasing Violations in the Wild
Type-based alias analysis, where pointers to different types are assumed to point to distinct objects, gives compilers a simple and effective way to disambiguate memory references in order to generate better code. Unfortunately, C and C++ make it easy for programmers to violate the assumptions upon which type-based alias analysis is built. “Strict aliasing” refers […]
Testing LLVM
[This piece is loosely a followup to this one.] Background Once a piece of software reaches a certain size, it is guaranteed to be loosely specified and not completely understood by any individual. It gets committed to many times per day by people who are only loosely aware of each others’ work. It has many […]
A Tourist’s Guide to the LLVM Source Code
In my Advanced Compilers course last fall we spent some time poking around in the LLVM source tree. A million lines of C++ is pretty daunting but I found this to be an interesting exercise and at least some of the students agreed, so I thought I’d try to write up something similar. We’ll be […]