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Russ Cox authored
This is an experiment in static analysis of Go programs to understand which struct fields a program might use. It is not part of the Go language specification, it must be enabled explicitly when building the toolchain, and it may be removed at any time. After building the toolchain with GOEXPERIMENT=fieldtrack, a specific field can be marked for tracking by including `go:"track"` in the field tag: package pkg type T struct { F int `go:"track"` G int // untracked } To simplify usage, only named struct types can have tracked fields, and only exported fields can be tracked. The implementation works by making each function begin with a sequence of no-op USEFIELD instructions declaring which tracked fields are accessed by a specific function. After the linker's dead code elimination removes unused functions, the fields referred to by the remaining USEFIELD instructions are the ones reported as used by the binary. The -k option to the linker specifies the fully qualified symbol name (such as my/pkg.list) of a string variable that should be initialized with the field tracking information for the program. The field tracking string is a sequence of lines, each terminated by a \n and describing a single tracked field referred to by the program. Each line is made up of one or more tab-separated fields. The first field is the name of the tracked field, fully qualified, as in "my/pkg.T.F". Subsequent fields give a shortest path of reverse references from that field to a global variable or function, corresponding to one way in which the program might reach that field. A common source of false positives in field tracking is types with large method sets, because a reference to the type descriptor carries with it references to all methods. To address this problem, the CL also introduces a comment annotation //go:nointerface that marks an upcoming method declaration as unavailable for use in satisfying interfaces, both statically and dynamically. Such a method is also invisible to package reflect. Again, all of this is disabled by default. It only turns on if you have GOEXPERIMENT=fieldtrack set during make.bash. R=iant, ken CC=golang-dev https://golang.org/cl/6749064
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