Tzi-cker Chiueh has developed a low-overhead bounds checking feature and approached the FSF about having it incorporated in GCC. This discussion originally was forwarded to the GCC Steering Committee, so I am redirecting the conversation to the main GCC mailinglist. Hopefully some members of the GCC community who are knowledgeable about this type of technology will follow up with Tzi-cker.
Thanks, David ------- Forwarded Message Mudflap performs not-so-complete bound checking on C programs. Already its performance overhead is 300%-500% of the original execution time. Our initial bound checking compiler, CASH (http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/cash/index.html), can perform complete bound checking for C programs with a performance overhead of less than 10%. The reason it can achieve this feat is because it exploits segmentation hardware on X86/IA32 architecture. Because segmentation hardware is not supported in IA64 and other embedded processors, our current proposal is to exploit "debug resgister" hardware, which is more universal, to achieve the same array bound checking performance level as CASH. CASH's low run-time overhead makes it practical for the first time to turn on bound checking for production-mode server programs such as Apache or BIND. ------- End of Forwarded Message
