Spinal Tap: High level analysis for heavy metal systems

Abstract

Program comprehension tools targeting specific high-level languages do not currently scale to the complexities of many of today's low level systems. At the lowest level, the wide variety of architectures and platforms results in a widening spectrum of instruction sets and assembly languages. Slightly above this level, C-based systems targeting multiple architectures and platforms are riddled with compiler directives to accommodate the demands of configurable systems. This paper proposes a generalized and extensible framework for the purpose of program navigation and analysis, leveraging an intermediate representation of source code to separate low-level domain detail from tool support. A prototype of this framework is provided with two case studies evaluating its efficacy within multiple domains. This study demonstrates the feasibility of an extensible framework as a common core for low-level program comprehension tools.