IceBear: A Fine-Grained Incremental Scheduler for C/C++ Static Analyzers
Yu Xiao, Xutong Ma, Zhilin Li, Jun Yan · 2025
Static analyzers are commonly integrated into real-world development workflows to detect hidden code defects throughout iterative development. However, some analyzers do not support incremental analysis or only support coarse-grained incremental analysis, leading to substantial time wasted on redundant analysis, as well as numerous reports unrelated to the modifications made in this iteration. To address these issues, this paper proposes IceBear, a scheduling framework that supports three C/C++ static analyzers, offering fine-grained incremental analysis. IceBear pinpoints the changed code ranges and propagates these changes to other affected components (e.g., AST nodes, functions). By extracting this detailed diff information, IceBear implements a function-level incremental analysis, enabling it to reduce redundant checks and filter unrelated reports. Experimental results show that IceBear can reduce 60.4% of the overall analysis duration and eliminate 92.3% of reports that are unrelated to the modifications.