WG211/M17VanWyk

Extensible and Composable Type Qualifiers in AbleC

- Eric Van Wyk

In this talk I will describe recent work on type qualifiers in our extensible compiler framework for C, ableC. We show how independently-developed language extensions can add new type qualifiers, static analysis of expressions driven by these qualifiers, and the generation of dynamic data conversion and error checking code based on such qualifiers. This work extends the previous "Theory of Type Qualifiers" work by Foster, Fahndrich, and Aiken. Existing C qualifiers such as 'const' fit into this scheme. New qualifiers and their associated analyses can check for null pointer dereferences, provide a description of units (meters, seconds, liters, etc) for numeric values representing measurements and check for correct use of such values, array bounds checking, among others.