Source-To-Source Analysis with SATIrE - an Example Revisited

Source-to-source analysis aims at supporting the reuse of analysis results similar to code reuse. The reuse of program code is a common technique which attempts to save time and costs by reducing redundant work. We want to avoid re-analyzing parts of a software system, such as library code. In the ideal case the analysis results are directly associated with the program itself. Source-to-source analysis supports this through program annotations. Further more, to get the best out of available software analysis tools, we aim at enabling the combination of the analysis results of different tools. In order to allow this, tools must be able to process another tool’s analysis results. This enables numerous applications such as automatic annotation of interfaces, testing of analyses by checking the results of an analysis against provided annotations, domain aware analysis by utilizing domain-specific program annotations, and making analysis results persistent as annotations in source code. The design of the Static Analysis Tool Integration Engine (SATIrE [6]) allows to map source code annotations to its intermediate program representation as well as generating source code annotations from analysis results that are attached to the intermediate representation. The technical challenges are the design of the analysis information annotation language, the bidirectional propagation of the analysis information through different phases of the internal translation processes, and the combination of the different analyses through the plug-in mechanism. In its current version SATIrE targets C/C++ programs. In this paper we present the approach of source-to-source analysis and show in a detailed example analysis how we support this approach in SATIrE.