The Design And Implementation Of Symbol Table For Software Safety Checking Tools

With the increasing of importance of the software safety, how to statically checking the vulnerabilities of the software effectively is becoming an important issue.This paper describes a C/C++ static safety analyzer, and discusses the design and implementation of the symbol table subsystem which is used to collect information of the program and provide information for the analyzer.In this paper, firstly, a new infrastructure of symbol table for the analyzer is put forward, and the design of data structure is introduced. Secondly, implementation problems of the symbol table and the solutions are discussed. Finally, how the symbol table provides efficient help during the procedure of the safety analysis check is discussed.This paper mainly focuses on how to solve the designing problem of the scope, class symbol, function symbol, template symbol in symbol table. And the most complex works are the implementation of function overloading resolution, the instantiation and specialization of template in symbol table.The new symbol table framework which provides help for analyzer is constructed by the standard C/C++ grammars and can be applied to all the front ends of the compilers. According to the verification of practical experiments, this symbol table can be well used for the static safety analyzer.This symbol table has good scalability, and can support for more languages and platforms. It can also be a good reference for people to create other front ends of compilers.