Category: Compilers

  • Compilation and Hyperthreading

    Hyperthreading (HT) may or may not be a performance win, depending on the workload. I had poor luck with HT in the Pentium 4 era and ever since then have just disabled it in the BIOS on the idea that the kind of software that I typically wait around for—compilers and SMT solvers—is going to…

  • Isolating a Free-Range Miscompilation

    If we say that a compiler is buggy, we need to be able to back up that claim with reproducible, compelling, and understandable evidence. Usually, this evidence centers on a test case that triggers the buggy behavior; we’ll say something like “given this test case, compiler A produces an executable that prints 0 whereas compiler…

  • A Month of Invalid GCC Bug Reports, and How to Eliminate Some of Them

    During July 2016 the GCC developers marked 38 bug reports as INVALID. Here’s the full list. They fall into these (subjective) categories: 8 bug reports stemmed from undefined behavior in the test case (71753, 71780, 71803, 71813, 71885, 71955, 71957, 71746) 1 bug report was complaining about UB exploitation in general (71892) 15 bug reports…

  • Pointer Overflow Checking

    Most programming languages have a lot of restrictions on the kinds of pointers that programs can create. C and C++ are unusually permissive in this respect: pointers to arbitrary objects and subobjects, usually all the way down to bytes, can be constructed. Consequently, most address computations can be expressed either in terms of integer arithmetic…

  • Checking Up on Dataflow Analyses

    An important tool for reasoning about programs without running them is dataflow analysis, which can be used to compute facts such as: an integer-valued variable is non-negative at a particular program point a conditional branch always goes one way an indirect write cannot modify a particular array Dataflow facts drive optimizations such as constant propagation…

  • Efficient Integer Overflow Checking in LLVM

    (Here’s some optional background reading material.) We want fast integer overflow checking. Why? First, if the undefined behavior sanitizers go faster then testing goes faster. Second, when overhead drops below a certain point people will become willing to use UBSan to harden production code against integer overflows. This is already being done in parts of…

  • SQLite with a Fine-Toothed Comb

    One of the things I’ve been doing at Trust-in-Soft is looking for defects in open-source software. The program I’ve spent the most time with is SQLite: an extremely widely deployed lightweight database. At ~113 KSLOC of pointer-intensive code, SQLite is too big for easy static verification. On the other hand, it has an incredibly impressive…

  • The Strict Aliasing Situation is Pretty Bad

    I’ll start with a quick review of the strict aliasing rules in C and C++ and then present some less well-known material. Strict Aliasing Compiler optimizations are often shot down by the potential for pointers to be aliases. For example, although we might naively expect a compiler to optimize this function to return zero, that…

  • A Variable Argument Hazard

    Variable argument functions in C and C++ can be tricky to use correctly, and they typically only get compiler-based type checking for special cases such as printf(). Recently I ran across an entertaining variable argument bug using tis-interpreter. Although I will use code from SQLite to illustrate this bug, this bug has not been found…

  • The Problem with Friendly C

    I’ll assume you’re familiar with the Proposal for Friendly C and perhaps also Dan Bernstein’s recent call for a Boring C compiler. Both proposals are reactions to creeping exploitation of undefined behaviors as C/C++ compilers get better optimizers. In contrast, we want old code to just keep working, with latent bugs remaining latent. After publishing…