Analyzing C/C++ code entities and relations for program understanding

Abstract

This paper describes the static analysis tool for finding program entities, their metrics, and relations between entities. Program entities are files/directories (physical structure) and classes/functions/methods/global variables (logical structure). Relations are connections between entities, such as calls, inheritance, aggregation, reading/writing, inclusion. We describe the methods for developing such a tool for C/C++ languages based on open source components: LLVM/Clang compiler infrastructure, GNU Binutils linker and archiver. We are sketching the changes that were required to be made in the Clang compiler, and we discuss the analysis methods implemented in the LLVM analyzer. We briefly present the results of testing our tool on Android OS.