[Soot-list] Heros visualize exploded graph

[Eric Bodden]

Hi Marc-Andre.

> I would like to visualize my exploded graph - just to make sure my data
> flow functions are good.
>
> I don't see any options for that right now. Did anyone implement anything?
>
> I am guessing that we are running close to Graphviz' limits, so an
> export to .dot format may not be ideal.

I have started a project to that end. It allows you to run Heros
directly through an Eclipse run configuration. When executing, it will
then draw arrows directly as overlays over the code. I have actually
announced this as a thesis topic (see here:
http://www.ec-spride.tu-darmstadt.de/lehre_1/abschlussarbeitdetails_2176.en.jsp)
but I have not found a student yet. I was thinking of proposing this
as a GSOC project. But if you would like to help out, you are most
welcome to make contributions in this space. I think finding a *good*
visualization will be challenging.

> Also, I don't see any easy way to traverse the exploded graph with the
> results given by IFDSSolver. It seems to me that, if I want to find
> everywhere a given fact is true, I need to manually pick the seeds and
> traverse the interprocedural cfg, Unit afer Unit. It sounds like
> duplicating the work IFDSSolver already did :) Is there some debug APIs
> that would help anywhere?

Here's a trick I play in our taint analysis: Whenever the abstract
domain hits a certain value I want to report an error. For that
purpose I just extended the flow function to fill an auxiliary data
structure with those code locations. If they are few enough then this
is quite efficient.

Eric