Recently PVS-Studio has implemented a major feature—we supported intermodular analysis of C++ projects. This article covers our and other tools' implementations. You'll also find out how to try this feature and what we managed to detect using it.

Intermodular analysis of C++ projects in PVS-Studio

by Oleg Lisiy, Sergey Larin

From the article:

We can't apply the approach above to the PVS-Studio tool. Our analyzer's main difference from compilers is that it doesn't form intermediate representation that is abstracted from the language context. Therefore, to read a symbol from another module, the tool has to translate it again and represent a program as in-memory data structures (parse tree, control flow graph, etc). Data flow analysis may also require parsing the entire dependency graph by symbols in different modules. Such a task may take a long time. So, we collect information about symbols (in particular in data flow analysis) using semantic analysis. We need to somehow save this data separately beforehand. Such information is a set of facts for a particular symbol. We developed the below approach based on this idea.