0.11

Changes to the GCC Python Plugin

The main change in this release is support for compiling the plugin with a C++ compiler. Recent versions of GCC 4.7 are now built with C++ rather than C, meaning that plugins must also be built with C++ (since all of GCC’s internal symbols are name-mangled). This release fixes the plugin’s Makefile so that it autodetects whether the plugin needs to be built with a C or C++ compiler and (I hope) does the right thing automatically. I’ve also made the necessary changes to the C source code of the plugin so that it is compilable as either language.

This should enable the plugin to now be usable with recent builds of gcc 4.7.* (along with gcc 4.6).

The plugin doesn’t yet support gcc 4.8 prereleases.

Other fixes:

• there is now a unique gcc.Edge wrapper for each underlying edge in GCC’s control flow graphs, rather than the old erroneous behavior of having multiple identical duplicate wrappers.
• fixed missing documentation for gcc.SsaName, and gcc.Edge’s true_value and false_value flags

Internal improvements to gcc-with-cpychecker

The CPython static analysis code shipped with the plugin contains a detailed description of the behavior of the CPython API (e.g. which arguments will lead to a segfault if NULL, and why; the possible outcomes of a call and their impact on reference-counts; etc).

However, these descriptions were tightly bound to implementation details of the checker.

This release introduces a new internal API to the analyzer for describing the possible behaviors of CPython API entrypoints, in an attempt to decouple these descriptions from the checker, and ports many of the descriptions to using it.

These changes shouldn’t be visible to users of the checker, but should make future maintenance much easier.