Serializing C Intermediate Representations to Promote Efficiency and Portability

C static analysis tools need access to intermediate representations (IRs) that organize program data in a well-structured manner. However, the C parsers that create IRs are slow, and they are not available for most languages. To solve these problems, we investigate two language-independent, on-disk representations of C IRs: one using XML, and the other using an Internet standard binary encoding called XDR. We benchmark the parsing speeds of both options, finding the XML to be about five times slower than parsing C and the XDR about four times faster. We also demonstrate the portability of our XDR system by presenting a C querying tool in Ruby. Our solution and the insights we gained from building it will be useful to analysis authors and other clients of C IRs.