CIL is a front-end for the C programming language that facilitates program analysis and transformation. CIL will parse and typecheck a program, and compile it into a simplified subset of C.
CIL supports ANSI C as well as most of the extensions of the GNU C and Microsoft C compilers. A Perl script acts as a drop in replacement for either gcc or Microsoft's cl, and allows merging of the source files in your project. Other features include support for control-flow and points-to analyses.
Read the excellent CIL tutorial by Zachary Anderson, and check out the accompanying project template.
Run the following commands to build and install CIL:
./configure
make
make check # very quick check, optionnal
make install # as root or using sudo
You only need the OCaml compiler, perl, and ocamlfind for the installation. (Of course, you also need some C compiler.)
You can use cilly (installed in /usr/local/bin by default) as a drop in replacement for gcc to compile and link your programs.
You can also use CIL as a library to write your own programs. For instance in the OCaml toplevel using findlib:
$ ocaml
Objective Caml version 4.00.1
# #use "topfind";;
[...]
# #require "cil";;
[...]
# Cil.cilVersion;;
- : string = "1.7.0"
The documentation is located in the doc/html/cil directory. The API documentation (generated by ocamldoc) is in the api subdirectory.
To (re)build the doc, you need Hevea and run:
make doc
You can also browse the documentation online.
CIL comes with a test suite. You need perl and Hevea (because one of the tests builds the documentation):
cd test
./testcil --run
CIL is maintained by Gabriel Kerneis kerneis@pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr