C Intermediate Language (CIL)

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.

Quick start

Install the latest release of CIL with opam:

opam install cil

Read the excellent CIL tutorial by Zachary Anderson, and
check out the accompanying project template.

Installation

To build and install CIL, you need the OCaml compiler, perl, and
ocamlfind. (Of course, you also need some C compiler,
preferably gcc.)

Run the following commands to build and install CIL:

./configure
make
make test       # regression test suite, optionnal
make install    # as root or using sudo

If you want to install to some other directory, you can tweak the prefix
during the configure step. For instance, to install in your local opam
directory:

FORCE_PERL_PREFIX=1 ./configure --prefix=`opam config var prefix`

Usage

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 = "1.7.3"

More documentation

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.

Ressources

• Mailing list
• Bug tracker

CIL is maintained by Gabriel Kerneis gabriel@kerneis.info