Dynamic Members

The dynamic member mechanism enables the extension of a managed class with an additional member. Many analyses require members which may not be part of the core class. To solve this problem, the dynamic member mechanism can be used.

A number of steps are needed to enable the usage of the member:

1. An instance of the type t_dynamic_member_info needs to be defined to keep track of the new member
2. An Init, Fini and Dup function need to be written to define the behaviour when an instance of the class is created, killed or duplicated
3. A DYNAMIC_MEMBER declaration of the new member

This will trigger the creation of an initialization and a finalization function. The usage of the member is transparent (identical to core members) once this initialization function has been called until a call to the finalization function is executed. Note that these auto-generated functions are different from the user-defined functions in step 2. The former are used to add and remove the member to the class, while the latter are called with each creation/destruction of an instance of the class. The member can then be further used as follows:

4. A call to the auto-generated initialization function will create the member for all instances of the class
5. The member can now be used as if it were part of the core class
6. The member can be removed using the auto-generated finalization function

We illustrate this through a small example: suppose we want to extend the basic block datastructure with an additional member of the type boolean. This boolean will be used in a reachability analysis and is therefore called reachable. We proceed as follows:

/*step 1*/
t_dynamic_member_info bbl_reachable_array = null_info;

/*step 2*/
void 
BblReachableInit(t_bbl * bbl, t_bool * reachable)
{
  *reachable = FALSE;
}

void 
BblReachableFini(t_bbl * bbl, t_bool * reachable)
{
  return;
}

void 
BblReachableDup(t_bbl * bbl, t_bool * reachable)
{
  return;
}

/*step 3*/
DYNAMIC_MEMBER(
               bbl,                  /*The datastructure to which the member will be added, without the 't_' prefix*/
               t_cfg *,              /*the manager of the datastructure*/
               bbl_reachable_array,  /*an instance of t_dynamic_member_info to store the members*/
               t_bool,               /*the type of the member*/
               reachable,            /*the name of the member in lower case*/
               REACHABLE,            /*the name of the member in upper case*/
               Reachable,            /*the name of the member in regular case*/
               CFG_FOREACH_BBL,      /*an iterator which iterates over all instances of 
                                       the managed class contained in the manager class*/
               BblReachableInit,     /*The function to be called when an instance of the
                                       class is created*/
               BblReachableFini,     /*The function to be called when an instance of the
                                       class is killed*/
               BblReachableDup       /*The function to be called when an instance of the
                                       class is duplicated*/
               );

This will create the functions BblInitReachable and BblFiniReachable

/*step 4*/
BblInitReachable(cfg);

/*step 5*/
/*examples of the usage of the field*/
if(BBL_REACHABLE(bbl))
{
   ...
}

BBL_SET_REACHABLE(bbl, TRUE);

/*step 6*/
BblFiniReachable(cfg);

Note that the function BblInitReachable and BblFiniReachable should be called from within the same file if you want to avoid memory leaks.

At the moment, a hack is needed to duplicate the new member!

void 
BblReachableDup(t_bbl * bbl, t_bool * reachable)
{
  t_bbl * orig_bbl=global_hack_dup_orig;
  *reachable=BBL_REACHABLE(orig_bbl);
  return;
}