LLVM Offers New Clang With SAFECode Technology

The Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) developers have released a new version of their Clang C/C++ compiler. What's new to this Clang release, which comes months after the 2.9 release of LLVM and Clang, is that it integrates SAFECode Technology. SAFECode provides memory safety checking, which LLVM developers designed to be superior to Valgrind -- the tool commonly used by open-source developers for running memory checks on their code.

Over Valgrind, LLVM developers say that SAFECode in Clang is faster since it doesn't rely upon dynamic binary translation, is more accurate, and provides better error diagnostics with useful information about each memory safety violation.

This current release detects de-references of pointers that are generated from buffer overflows. Additionally, working its way into Clang mainline is support for detecting invalid memory access, invalid calls to free(), usage of un-initalized pointers, memory errors by the misuse of the C standard library functions, and several options.

SAFECode can be activated in Clang by a command-line switch, otherwise this open-source C/C++ compiler works in its normal manner without the memory checking support.

More details can be found in the release announcement of the new Clang with SAFECode.