Dynamically Diagnosing Type Errors in Unsafe Code

作者：Kell Stephen^*

来源：ACM Sigplan Notices, 2016, 51(10): 800-819.

DOI：10.1145/2983990.2983998

• C
• unsafe code
• pointers
• type information

Existing approaches for detecting type errors in unsafe languages are limited. Static analysis methods are imprecise, and often require source-level changes, while most dynamic methods check only memory properties (bounds, liveness, etc.), owing to a lack of run-time type information. This paper describes libcrunch, a system for binary-compatible run-time type checking of unmodified unsafe code, currently focusing on C. Practical experience shows that our prototype implementation is easily applicable to many real codebases without source-level modification, correctly flags programmer errors with a very low rate of false positives, offers a very low run-time overhead, and covers classes of error caught by no previously existing tool.

• 出版日期2016-10