Svadev mailing list

[Kumud Bhandari <kb20 AT rice.edu>]

Hi,
Thanks for your reply.

> Second, whether a project will be suitable for a semester project  
> depends upon whether you'll be doing one project together or two  
> individual projects.  It will also depend on how much compiler  
> experience you have.  Have either of you taken a compiler course?

We have taken all the compiler courses offered at Rice :) We are
familiar with some of the compiler infrastructures (Rose, soot), but
not with LLVM.

> Third, you may want to think about whether a project can be the  
> starting point for a research paper.  Many of the projects below  
> involve no research.  At Illinois, we try to find, if possible,  
> projects that can be part of a larger research paper.


We are also looking for a project that could lead to a research paper.

> On to the specific projects:
>
>
> -> Improve static array bounds checking
> I believe Ott Tinn wrote a simple optimization pass that does some  
> static array bounds checking.
> However, I suspect that there's plenty of other static array bounds  
> checking passes that could be written, including ones that are  
> inter-procedural and/or that can handle values read from memory  
> objects (all the existing analyses only handle values that are  
> always in SSA form).  There's also a number of approaches to try  
> (e.g., using range analysis, using an SMT solver, etc.).
>
> The project can be challenging but I think would make a good  
> project.  If you decide to pick such a project, please email the  
> list.  I and my fellow students wrote a static array bounds checking  
> analysis for SAFECode using the CVC3 SMT solver (sadly, it hasn't  
> turned out as well as we'd hoped), so I think I can provide some  
> valuable insights on what to try.

I think this is the project in which we are particularly interested.
If you could share what type of approach you guys took and insights
you got, it would be immensely helpful.


We located some array bounds check code at
http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/safecode/branches/release_30/lib/ArrayBoundChecks/

Is this the optimization pass written by Ott Tinn ? Does it also
include the analysis using CVC3 SMT solver ?


Thanks,
Rishi
Kumud