The existing unreachable IR removal code only retargeted an infeasible edge to an `Unreached` instruction if the successor of the edge was an unreachable block. This is too conservative, because it doesn't remove an infeasible edge that targets a block that is still reachable via other paths. The trivial example of this is `do { } while (false);`, where the back edge is infeasible, but the body block is still reachable from the loop entry.
This change retargets all infeasible edges to `Unreached` instructions, regardless of the reachability of the successor block.
With these changes we can run `odasa prepareQueries --check-only
--fail-on-warnings` on the C++ query directory. Two changes were needed:
1. The `Metrics/queries.xml` file had to be deleted. It existed because
the built distribution has a different file layout, where `Metrics`
is moved to the top-level query dir `odasa-cpp-metrics`. Since
internal PR 28230 this file is created as needed as part of the dist
build process, so it doesn't need to be checked in with the sources.
2. All uses of the `deprecated` and stubbed-out Objective C classes were
removed.
The AST-based data flow libraries and the IR-based ones both define
modules `DataFlow`, `DataFlow2`, etc. This caused
`ImportAdditionalLibraries.ql` to fail in compilation.
This change removes any IR instructions that can be statically proven unreachable. To detect unreachable IR, we first run a simple constant value analysis on the IR. Then, any `ConditionalBranch` with a constant condition has the appropriate edge marked as "infeasible". We define a class `ReachableBlock` as any `IRBlock` with a path from the entry block of the function. SSA construction has been modified to operate only on `ReachableBlock` and `ReachableInstruction`, which ensures that only reachable IR gets translated into SSA form. For any infeasible edge where its predecessor block is reachable, we replace the original target of the branch with an `Unreached` instruction, which lets us preserve the invariant that all `ConditionalBranch` instructions have both a true and a false edge, and allows guard inference to still work.
The changes to `SSAConstruction.qll` are not as scary as they look. They are almost entirely a mechanical replacement of `OldIR::IRBlock` with `OldBlock`, which is just an alias for `ReachableBlock`.
Note that the `constant_func.ql` test can determine that the two new test functions always return 0.
Removing unreachable code helps get rid of some common FPs in IR-based dataflow analysis, especially for constructs like `while(true)`.
This change moves the simple constant analysis that was used by the const_func test into a pyrameterized module for use on any stage of the IR. This will be used to detect unreachable code.
This sort of fixes one FP and causes a new FN, but for the wrong reasons. The IR dataflow is tracking the reference itself, rather than the referred-to object. Once we can better model indirections, we can make this work correctly.
This change is still the right thing to do, because it ensures that the dataflow is looking at actual expression being computed by the instruction.