Physical type checking for C

Satish Chandra, Thomas W. Reps

Abstract: The effectiveness of traditional type checking in C is limited by the presence of type conversions using type casts. Because the C standard allows arbitrary type conversions between pointer types, neither C compilers, nor tools such as lint, can guarantee type safety in the presence of such type conversions. In particular, by using casts involving pointers to structures (C structs), a programmer can interpret any memory region to be of any desired type, further compromising C's weak type system. Not only do type casts make a program vulnerable to type errors, they hinder program comprehension and maintenance by creating latent dependencies between seemingly independent pieces of code.To address these problems, we have developed a stronger form of type checking for C programs, called physical type checking. Physical type checking takes into account the layout of C struct fields in memory. This paper describes an inference-based physical type checking algorithm. Our algorithm can be used to perform static safety checks, as well as compute useful information for software engineering applications.