The GlobalGCC project launches

Dear All,

My collegues from the GGCC consortium have asked me to send the following
announcement to this GCC mailing list.

Please reply to contact@ggcc.info, arnaud.laprevote@mandriva.com
for any remarks and questions regarding GGCC



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ANNOUNCEMENT for the launch of the GlobalGCC [GGCC] project within the
ITEA [Information Technology for European Advancement] programme

 

GENERAL INFORMATION

 

In September 2006, a 15-partners consortium has started to work on the
GlobalGCC [GGCC] project, within the ITEA [Information Technology for
European Advancement] programme (see http://www.itea2.org/).

 

The GGCC project will last 30 months and is partly funded (around
30%-40%) by French, Spanish and Swedish public authorities.

 

The partnership is composed of various types of entities (Small and
Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) +, big corporations ++, research labs
and universities *) that are listed hereafter in alphabetical order per
country:

 

in France: Airbus/France (++), Bertin (+), CEA-LIST (*), INRIA-Futurs
(*), Mandriva (+)

 

in Spain: Aquiline (+), Answare (+), Base (+), IDI Eikon (+), SQS (+),
Telefonica I+D (++), UPM (*)

 

in Sweden: MySQL A.B (+), SICS (*), Syxoo (+)

 

The project leader is Mandriva (the company behind the Mandriva
ex-Mandrakesoft Linux distribution in France).

 

 

OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

 

The GGCC (ITEA) project aims to extend the free GNU Compiler Collection
by globally processing several compilation units (e.g. work on a whole
program or on a library)  in order to customize and configure GCC to
European software industry needs : for performance level or for better
diagnosis.

 

The GGCC (ITEA) contribution will be GPL licenced free software, and will
be proposed to the FSF. The GGCC (ITEA) consortium is determined to work
in close cooperation with the GCC community and the FSF.

 

In an effort to empower the mainline GCC4 compiler from FSF (which
focuses on code generation quality and compilation speed) with advanced
compile-time techniques, the GGCC (ITEA) project aims at integrating
into a GCC4 branch sophisticated program-wide compile-time analyses.  As
a result of that, it is expected that GGCC be more resource consuming
(e.g., it could run 10 times slower than the GCC4 compiler).  In return
for that speed loss, more program bugs are expected to be pinpointed,
and programmers will be able to state properties to be met in their
code.  Additionally, all the good characteristics of GGCC (high-quality
code, number of available back-ends, etc.) are expected to be kept. 

 

The GGCC (ITEA) product will be hosted on Unix/Posix/GNU/Linux environments.

 

The GGCC (ITEA) project aims to extend GCC through continuing research
efforts, providing tools, interfaces and documentation which will enable
new approaches to be developed around program-wide static analysis
techniques. The static analysis of GGCC (ITEA) will work on the GIMPLE
internal representations of GCC, hence be usable for all the current
source languages and target systems available today in GCC.

 

The static analysis techniques projected for GGCC (ITEA) will be means
permitting:

 

1. Global program-wide optimisation (because the properties inferred at
a given call site may be propagated to avoid useless computations in the
program; for example if on a given call site and calling context the
static analyser determined that a pointer is not null, pointing to a
local variable which is positive, this information can be used to
optimise further on, etc...).

 

2. Hazard detections, that are warnings (for the developer using GGCC

(ITEA) compiler) about possible threats like: if a function f() was
called by g() called by h(x) with x>0 then at line 345 of foo.c there is
a possible zero-divide fault. The challenge is to reduce the number of
false positive alarms (which are stricto sensu unavoidable).

 

3. Coding rule validation: A formalism will be defined by the GGCC
consortium to express coding rules, and to use static analysis
techniques to validate some of them.

 

To permit development of static analysis techniques, some work on the
GCC infrastructure (in particular, persistency of GIMPLE internal
representation and extensions of it) is required.

 

 

CONTACT DETAILS

 

The main contact person is Arnaud Laprévote who can be contacted at the
following e-mail address: arnaud.laprevote@mandriva.com
<mailto:arnaud.laprevote@mandriva.com>

 

The GGCC web site is: www.ggcc.info (will be operational very soon)

 

Comments and remarks are welcome and can be sent to the following e-mail
address: contact@ggcc.info <mailto:contact@ggcc.info>

 

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NB: all my other emails to this or other lists are only mine, and my own
work on GCC is partly funded by this GGCC project (ITEA labelled)

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ 
email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net 
aliases: basile<at>tunes<dot>org = bstarynk<at>nerim<dot>net
8, rue de la Faïencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France