Towards a Resident Static Analysis

Abstract

The software engineering industry is moving from run-once tools to resident servers. This is well seen in the compiler industry, which accelerated the development of Language Server protocols used in Integrated Development Environments. Static analysis can also benefit from it. In our static analyzer framework, we experimented with making the analysis resident. The implementation comprises the mediator serving user’s requests and analyzer units doing static analysis, saving the results to shared or local databases. Thus, the resident analyzer is an adaptation of a software-as-a-service model to the field. In the paper, we present the stages the analyzer goes through, including controlled compilation, data fetching, preliminary and on-demand analysis, show their corner cases. The model was tested in two scenarios. For a single query, the resident analyzer is acting 6–40% worse than a standalone version with a defined analysis plan, which is expected due to memory usage optimization. In a failover scenario, the rescheduling avoids data loss at the cost of increased computation time. These effects shape the differences between models and their applications.