Re: alias analysis

Chris Lattner <sabre@nondot.org>
6 Apr 2002 23:20:32 -0500

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From: Chris Lattner <sabre@nondot.org>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 6 Apr 2002 23:20:32 -0500
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
References: 02-03-182
Keywords: optimize, storage
Posted-Date: 06 Apr 2002 23:20:32 EST

> [If your program gives different answers with alias analysis, it's
> almost certainly got bugs, wild pointers or the like. -John]


Although the bugs might just be invocations of "undefined behavior" in
otherwise ok code. For example, C defines a set of type based alias
rules that can trip up the unwary doing pointer arithmetic. GCC has
supported the -f[no-]strict-aliasing option since type based alias
analysis was introduced. From the documentation:


"In particular, an object of one type is assumed never to reside at
the same address as an object of a different type, unless the types
are almost the same. For example, an unsigned int can alias an int,
but not a void* or a double. A character type may alias any other
type."


For sufficiently low level code (eg the linux kernel), C TBAA has
broken otherwise good code.


-Chris


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