A Review on working of Cflow

Abstract

In the field of program analysis, call graphs provide a succinct and human readable visual form of function flows in a program. Typically, call graphs are directed graphs, that determine the sequence of invocation of subroutines depicting the caller callee dependencies. This is used to tap the flow a program takes during execution, laying a foundation for further needful analysis. In this context, Call graph generators, taking a program as input, are typically used to generate call graphs. GNU Cflow, is one such tool. It accepts a C program or a number of C programs as input and generates a procedure flow, with clear caller-callee sequence distinguished by level indentation, with callee functions indented inside caller functions. This output can be altered by supplying different available flags and output-formatting options to suit the requirement. There is a lot of scope to revamp the Cflow source code and utilize the dispensed output. In this paper, we discuss the nature of cflow, its expected output, its limitations and scope for future research in it.