GCC 14 Boasts Nice ASCII Art For Visualizing Buffer Overflows

David Malcolm of Red Hat's compiler team is out with his annual blog post summarizing the static analysis improvements to find with the upcoming GCC 14 stable compiler release.

Malcolm has been continuing work on the static analyzer support (-fanalyzer) for the GNU Compiler Collection with yet more enhancements in this area. For one, GCC 14 gains a new "-Wanalyzer-infinite-loop" option to try to detect simple cases of infinite loops occurring.

Building off the analyzer's out-of-bounds warnings from GCC 13, the GCC 14 compiler is bringing improved visualizations for buffer overflows. Malcolm has worked out some nice text-based diagrams for better showing buffer overflow warnings so developers can better grasp the issue. Here are two example shared by David Malcolm of the improved ASCII art for visualizing a buffer overflow:

The GCC 14 analyzer also has improved support for analyzing C string operations, new taint-based warnings are now enabled by -fanalyzer, and more.

The stable GCC 14.1 compiler release is expected in the coming weeks. More details on these GCC 14 static analyzer improvements via the Red Hat Developers blog.