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From: Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>
To: Xavier Rival <Xavier.Rival@ens.fr>
Cc: Gabriel Kerneis <gabriel@kerneis.info>,  caml-list@inria.fr
References: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1310151429230.11179@ssh-di.ens.fr>
	<20131015124116.GA7090@kerneis.info>
	<alpine.DEB.2.02.1310151442260.20768@ssh-di.ens.fr>
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:13:57 +0200
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.02.1310151442260.20768@ssh-di.ens.fr> (Xavier
	Rival's message of "Tue, 15 Oct 2013 14:48:49 +0200 (CEST)")
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Subject: Re: [Caml-list] [ocaml-jobs] Developper position: designing a C
 front-end in OCaml

* Xavier Rival:

> I have used CIL in another project in the past. My experience is that
> it is a great front-end for program transformation. It is less adapted
> to static analysis though, as it does a lot of syntactic
> transformations, causing part of the structure of the code to be
> lost. For instance, it transforms loops into a while(1) form, with
> break statements. This design choice does not help static analyzers,
> and may require recalculating information that was lost in the early
> phases.

Clang mirrors the source pretty closely in its AST, so a Zephyr ASDL
model and serializer for that might be the way to go.  The advantage
would be that you get not just C, but also many popular extensions,
broadening the set of potential inputs for your analysis tools.

GCC is another option (using a similar approach), but it's trees are a
little less close to the source code.