This is a follow-up to D56042.
When a memory region is live, all its sub-regions and super-regions are automatically live (and vice versa), so it is only necessary to track liveness of base regions. This is exactly how we imagined this to work, but it turns out that it didn't.
The reason why it works correctly most of the time because the reachable symbol scanner is automatically marks all parent regions as reachable - and therefore they are marked as live by adding all of them to region roots every time a sub-region is marked as live. However, enumerating all *child* regions this way is problematic (there may be infinitely many of them).
In the test from D56042, the symbol for p.x dies because when .get() is called for the last time only p is kept alive by the Environment, but not p.x. Due to that, reg_$0<p.x> is believed to be dead - recall that SymbolRegionValue is kept alive by its parent region, and additionally notice that there are no explicit bindings anywhere else to keep it alive (because SymbolRegionValue is simply assumed to be there as long as the parent region is alive, rather than bound explicitly).
Now, when the RegionRoots test fails, isLiveRegion() falls through to see if the region is "lexically" alive. Here it correctly jumps to the base region p and looks if live variables analysis thinks it's alive. It doesn't! Because there's no need to compute expression 'p' anymore anywhere in the program.
What isLiveRegion() should have done is look up the base region in RegionRoots. But it doesn't. Hence the patch.
The newly added test_A demonstrates the problem even more clearly: having the symbol for a.x die before the call to a.foo() is definitely incorrect.
The other test, test_B, is an attempt to figure out whether the problem is also there "in the opposite direction". That is, when b.a is marked live, is b marked live automatically? Otherwise the lookup in RegionRoots would still fail.
The answer is yes, it does work correctly, because scanReachableSymbols always scans the whole super-region chain of every region. Which means that every time the Environment or the Store marks a region as live, all of its super-regions are added to RegionRoots. However, i would still like to add conversion to the base region into markLive(), because this behavior is something that should be guaranteed by SymbolReaper rather implied by callers manually, even if the callers have to do that anyway.
So for now the change in markLive() does not affect functionality at all, but it will be important when checkers use the checkLiveSymbols() functionality more aggressively. Additionally it slightly decreases the size of the RegionRoots map for faster lookups but adds an extra time overhead for marking something as live (need to ascend to the base region). I didn't try to figure out whether it gives a net gain in performance.
For that reason the unit test as well. Also a few convenient getters were added to ExprEngine in order to make the test more concise.
Is this comment intentionally deleted?