Towards Better Symbol Resolution for C/C++ Programs: A Cluster-Based Solution

Resolving symbol references is an important part of many application areas from development environments to various static analyser tools, especially when it is used for code comprehension purposes. Different occurrences of the same program elements, like function definitions and their call sites, variable declarations and their usage, or type definitions and their applications should be connected. In case of the C++ programming language, the most current tools use mangled names to correlate symbols, e.g. when implementing actions like "go to definition" or "list all references". However, for large projects, where multiple binaries are created, symbol resolution based on mangled names can be, and usually is, ambiguous. This leads to inaccurate behaviour even in major development tools. In this paper we explore the reason of this ambiguity, and propose our clustering algorithm based on essential build information to improve the accuracy of symbol resolution. We implemented our method as part of the CodeCompass open source code comprehension tool and measured its efficiency.