The Design And Implementation Of Symbol Table Subsystem In C/C++ Static Safety Checker

This paper describes the design and implementation of the symbol table subsystem of a C/C++ static safety checker, XDCHECK, including the data structure and the operations it provides to serve the safety check process.The frontend of XDCHECK is based on the intermediate representation output of GCC. Due to the limitation of GCC intermediate representation, the main problem of symbol table subsystem is how to extact source code information from the intermediate representation and make the form of the information meet the requirement of XDCHECK. The symbol table subsystem also provide a set of algorithms to calculate the informations that is not stored in GCC intermediate representation such as virtual table informations of C++ classes. The symbol table subsystem successfully simplifies the implementation of XDCHECK safety check process.This paper also lists the main problems when implementing the symbol table sybsystem and the solutions. A list of the drawbacks of the current implementation and the improvements that may be applied in the further development are also proposed at the end of paper.