Compilers

During the summer of 2019, Huawei gave a series of presentations announcing the Ark Compiler technology. The company claims that this open-source project will help developers make the Android system and third-party software much more fluent and responsive. By tradition, every new promising open-source project goes through PVS-Studio for us to evaluate the quality of its code.

Introduction

The Ark Compiler was first announced by Huawei at the launch of the new smartphone models P30 and P30 Pro. It is claimed that the Ark Compiler will improve the fluency of the Android system by 24% and response speed by 44%. Third-party Android applications will also gain a 60% speed-up after recompilation with the Ark Compiler. The open-source version of the project is called OpenArkCompiler; its source code is available on Gitee, a Chinese fork of GitHub.

It's been two years since we last checked the code of the LLVM project with PVS-Studio, so let's see if PVS-Studio is still the leader among tools for detecting bugs and security weaknesses. We'll do that by scanning the LLVM 8.0.0 release for new bugs.

Once in a while we go back to the projects that we have previously checked using PVS-Studio, which results in their descriptions in various articles. Two reasons make these comebacks exciting for us. Firstly, the opportunity to assess the progress of our analyzer. Secondly, monitoring the feedback of the project's authors to our article and the report of errors, which we usually provide them with. Of course, errors can be corrected without our participation. However, it is always nice when our efforts help to make a project better. Roslyn was no exception. The previous article about this project check dates back to December 23, 2015. It's quite a long time, in the view of the progress that our analyzer has made since that time. Since the C# core of the PVS-Studio analyzer is based on Roslyn, it gives us additional interest in this project. As a result, we're as keen as mustard about the code quality of this project. Now let's test it once again and find out some new and interesting issues (but let's hope that nothing significant) that PVS-Studio will be able to find.

Origins

Several years ago I wrote a Pascal compiler. The motivation was simple: as a teenager, I had learnt from my first programming textbooks that a compiler is a very sophisticated thing. This claim eventually became a challenge and required to be tested by experience.


ha.art.pl

First, a simplistic PL/0 compiler came into being, and later an almost fully-functional Pascal compiler for MS-DOS has grown from it. My source of inspiration was the Compiler Construction book by Niklaus Wirth, the inventor of the Pascal language. I don't care if Wirth's views are now considered obsolete and have no direct connections to the IT mainstream, or if the compiler design fashion has changed. It is enough to know that his techniques are still simple, elegant, and — last but not least — bring much fun, since it is more appealing to parse a program source with a handwritten recursive descent parser and generate the machine code, rather than to call yaccs, bisons and all their descendants.

My compiler's fate was not so trivial. It has lived two lives: the first one in my own hands, and the second in the hands of computer antiquarians from Poland.