Researchers have proposed many tools and techniques that work by traversing the heap, including checkpointing systems, heap profilers, heap assertion checkers, and dynamic software updating systems. Yet building a heap traversal for C remains difficult, and to our knowledge extant services have used their own application-specific traversals. This paper presents C-strider, a framework for writing C heap traversals and transformations. Writing a basic C-strider service requires implementing only four callbacks; C-strider then generates a program-specific traversal that invokes the callbacks as each heap location is visited. Critically, C-strider is type aware---it tracks types as it walks the heap, so every callback is supplied with the exact type of the associated location. We used C-strider to implement heap serialization, dynamic software updating, heap checking, and profiling, and then applied the resulting traversals to several programs. We found C-strider requires little programmer effort, and the resulting services are efficient and effective.

[ DOI | http ]

@article{saur15strider,
  author = {Karla Saur and Michael Hicks and Jeffrey S. Foster},
  title = {C-Strider: Type-Aware Heap Traversal for {C}},
  journal = {Software, Practice, and Experience},
  month = may,
  year = 2015,
  issn = {1097-024X},
  doi = {10.1002/spe.2332},
  opturl = {https://mwhicks1.github.io/papers/cstrider.pdf}
}

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