Question

Assume I have a Cocoa-based Mac or iOS app. I’d like to run a static analyzer on my app’s source code or my app’s binary to retrieve a list of all Objective-C methods called therein. Is there a tool that can do this?

A few points:

1. I am looking for a static solution. I am not looking for a dynamic solution.

2. Something which can be run against either a binary or source code is acceptable.

3. Ideally the output would just be a massive de-duped list of Objective-C methods like:

   …
   -[MyClass foo]
   …
   +[NSMutableString stringWithCapacity:]
   …
   -[NSString length]
   …
   

   (If it’s not de-duped that’s cool)

4. If other types of symbols (C functions, static vars, etc) are present, that is fine.

5. I’m familiar with class-dump, but AFAIK, it dumps the declared Classes in your binary, not the called methods in your binary. That’s not what I’m looking for. If I am wrong, and you can do this with class-dump, please correct me.

6. I’m not entirely sure this is feasible. So if it’s not, that’s a good answer too. 🙂

Answer 1

The closest I’m aware of is otx, which is a wrapper around otool and can reconstruct the selectors at objc_msgSend() call sites.

http://otx.osxninja.com/