Examples of 3 program analysis tools for C

Example of using 3 program analysis tools for refactoring C code. Read more about it in my blog post: https://benjijang.com/posts/2022/03/no-pain-no-gain/. These are the tools that have some features that are necessary for refactoring and are well-supported (active authors and development). Try it out! Leave a PR if you have any questions/suggestions!

Each tool has a unique set of benefits and drawbacks. I chose these 3 tools because I think they are all well-designed, and want to help the community discover/use these wonderful authors' work.

Here are the 3 tools:

• srcML: an infrastructure for the exploration, analysis, and manipulation of source code
• Joern: The Bug Hunter's Workbench
• LLVM: a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies

Task

The trial task is to convert a for loop to a while loop. All for loops can be converted to while loops. This is a simple task, but it requires several non-trivial capabilities of the program analysis tool:

• Parse source code to an AST
• Granular AST nodes (required to access the init-statement, conditional, and iteration-expression)
• Multiple source code edits

As we will see, this exposes some differences between the tools in capability and ergonomics.

Example

Original for loop	Expected output (converted while loop)
int main() { int x = 0; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i ++) { x += 1; } return x; }	int main() { int x = 0; int i = 0; while (i < 10) { x += 1; i++; } return x; }

Organization

Tool source codes are in folders named srcml, joern, and llvm. One sample input program is in data. Expected output is as depicted above. timing.sh runs all tools and collects timing. The output from my run is collected in timing-report.txt.

Running the examples

Here are rough instructions for running the examples. Expected output is in the table above (on the right).

• srcml_example.py requires srcML, Python 3, and lxml.
  1. Install srcML according to the instructions at https://www.srcml.org/#download
  2. Assuming Python 3 is installed, install libs with pip install -r joern/requirements.txt
  3. Run example with python3 srcml/srcml_example.py data/loop_exchange.c
• joern_example.sc requires Joern to be installed.
  1. Install Joern according to the instructions at https://docs.joern.io/installation
  2. Run example with ~/bin/joern/joern-cli/joern --script joern/joern_example.sc --params inDirectory=data,inFile=data/loop_exchange.c
• llvm-example must be built with LLVM 12.0.1. It's implemented as a Clang tool named loop-convert based on LibTooling.
  1. To build the example, clone llvm-project@llvmorg-12.0.1 to llvm/llvm-project.
  2. Add loop-convert to the build with echo 'add_subdirectory(loop-convert)' >> llvm/llvm-project/clang-tools-extra/CMakeLists.txt
  3. Build LLVM according to the instructions in the LibASTMatchers Tutorial
  4. For convenience, prebuilt executable llvm/llvm-example is included. It was built on Ubuntu Docker
  5. Run example with llvm/llvm-example data/loop_exchange.c --

Timing comparison

Here are the results from running timing.sh. Units are in seconds. Timings were collected running on Ubuntu Docker, version 20.04.3 LTS.

Stat	srcML	Joern	LLVM
Runtime (sec), averaged over 5 runs	0.0702	6.2906	0.0230