Release notes for checker-XXX builds

checker-263

built: March 22, 2012
download: checker-263.tar.bz2

highlights:

• Fixes several serious bugs with inter-procedural analysis, including a case where retain/releases would be "double-counted".

checker-262

built: March 15, 2012
download: checker-262.tar.bz2

highlights:

• Enables experimental interprocedural analysis (within a file), which greatly amplifies the analyzer's ability to find issues.
• Many bug fixes to the malloc/free checker.
• Support for new Objective-C NSArray/NSDictionary/NSNumber literals syntax, and Objective-C container subscripting.

NOTE: This build contains new interprocedural analysis that allows the analyzer to find more complicated bugs that span function boundaries. It may have problems, performance issues, etc. We'd like to hear about them.

checker-261

built: February 22, 2012
download: checker-261.tar.bz2

highlights:

• Contains a new experimental malloc/free checker.
• Better support for projects using ARC.
• Warns about null pointers passed as arguments to C string functions.
• Warns about common anti-patterns in 'strncat' size argument, which can lead to buffer overflows.
• set-xcode-analyzer now supports self-contained Xcode.app (Xcode 4.3 and later).
• Contains a newer version of the analyzer than Xcode 4.3.
• Misc. bug fixes and performance work.

checker-260

built: January 25, 2012
download: checker-260.tar.bz2

highlights:

This is essentially the same as checker-259, but enables the following experimental checkers (please provide feedback):

• Warns about unsafe uses of CFArrayCreate, CFSetCreate, and CFDictionaryCreate
• Warns about unsafe uses of getpw, gets, which are sources of buffer overflows
• Warns about unsafe uses of mktemp and mktemps, which can lead to insecure temporary files
• Warns about unsafe uses of vfork, which is insecure to use
• Warns about not checking the return values of setuid, setgid, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid (another security issue)

checker-259

built: January 25, 2012
download: checker-259.tar.bz2

highlights:

• Contains a newer version of the analyzer than the one shipped in Xcode 4.2.
• Significant performance optimizations to reduce memory usage of the analyzer.
• Tweaks to scan-build to have it work more easily with Xcode projects using Clang.
• Numerous bug fixes to better support code using ARC.

checker-258

built: October 13, 2011

highlights:

• Contains a newer version of the analyzer than the one shipped in Xcode 4.2.
• Adds a new security checker for looking at correct uses of the Mac OS KeyChain API.
• Supports ARC (please file bugs where you see issues)
• Major under-the-cover changes. This should result in more precise results in some cases, but this is laying the groundwork for major improvements. Please file bugs where you see regressions or issues.

checker-257

built: May 25, 2011

highlights:

• The analyzer is now far more aggressive with checking conformance with Core Foundation conventions. Any function that returns a CF type must now obey the Core Foundation naming conventions, or use the cf_returns_retained or cf_returns_not_retained annotations.
• Fixed a serious regression where the analyzer would not analyze Objective-C methods in class extensions.
• Misc. bug fixes to improve analyzer precision.

checker-256

built: April 13, 2011

highlights:

• Lots of bug fixes and improvements to analyzer precision (fewer false positives, possibly more bugs found).
• Introductory analysis support for C++ and Objective-C++.

This build contains basic support for C++ and Objective-C++ that is ready to be tried out by general users. It is still in its infancy, but establishes a baseline for things to come. The main hope is that it can find some issues and have a reasonable false positive rate.

Please file bugs when you see issues of any kind so we can assess where development on C++ analysis support needs to be focused.

To try out C++ analysis support, it should work out of the box using scan-build. If you are using this checker build as a replacement to the analyzer bundled with Xcode, first use the set-xcode-analyzer script to change Xcode to use your version of the analyzer. You will then need to modify one configuration file in Xcode to enable C++ analysis support. This can be done with the following steps:

1. Find the clang .xcspec file:

   $ cd /Developer/Library
   $ find . | grep xcspec | grep Clang
   ./Xcode/<SNIP>/Clang LLVM 1.0.xcplugin/Contents/Resources/Clang LLVM 1.0.xcspec
   

2. The exact location of the file may vary depending on your installation of Xcode. Edit that file, and look for the string "--analyze":

     SourceFileOption = "--analyze";
     FileTypes = (
         "sourcecode.c.c",
         "sourcecode.c.objc",
     );
     ...
   

   Change the "FileTypes" entry to:

     FileTypes = (
         "sourcecode.c.c",
         "sourcecode.c.objc",
         "sourcecode.cpp.cpp",
         "sourcecode.cpp.objcpp",
     );
   

3. Restart Xcode.

checker-255

built: February 11, 2011

highlights:

• Mac OS X builds are now Intel i386 and x86_64 only (no ppc support)
• Turns on new -init method checker by default
• Reduces memory usage of analyzer by 10%
• Misc. fixes to reduce false positives on dead stores and idempotent operations.

checker-254

built: January 27, 2011

highlights:

• Introduces new -init method checker to check if a super class's init method is properly called.
• Objective-C retain/release checker now reasons about calls to property accessor methods (setter/getter).
• Introduces new attribute ns_consumes_self to educate the Objective-C retain/release checker about custom "init-like" methods that do not follow the standard Cocoa naming conventions.
• Introduces new attributes ns_consumed and cf_consumed to educate the Objective-C retain/release checker about methods/functions that decrement the reference count of a parameter.