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This is a simple GUI for browsing C test coverage data gathered by programs instrumented with gcc --coverage. Hence it's a graphical replacement for the gcov program that comes with gcc. It can also generate a static HTML report like the lcov program.

I wrote this program because I was sick of crappy text mode coverage results, having been spoilt some years earlier by the PureCoverage GUI.

To use ggcov:

• Instrument your code by building with gcc --coverage. This will generate some .gcno files.
• Run your tests. This will generate some .gcda files.
• Invoke ggcov with the filename of an executable, or with a source directory, or with one or more source (.c, .cxx etc) filenames. Ggcov will find and read the .gcno, and .gcda files and display data for you in some nice GUI windows.

Ggcov also comes with alternate ways to view coverage information.

• ggcov-html generates a directory full of static HTML, like lcov.
• git-history-coverage shows coverage correlated to recent git commits, useful for CI.
• tggcov emits text output like gcov, and has a mode to generate Coberatura format coverage reports, useful for CI.
• ggcov-run is a utility useful for running instrumented programs in directories other than their build directory, or on a different machine.
• ggcov-web is a PHP application for interactively displaying coverage data in a browser (superceded by ggcov-html).

Ggcov supports a powerful set of suppression primitives, so you can avoid your coverage numbers being under-reported due to code which you know will never execute.

The gcc+ggcov system has several limitations and gotches of which you should be aware.

• Gcc will add enough instrumentation to .gcno files for ggcov to tell that certain arcs between basic blocks are actually calls to other functions, but there isn't enough information to tell which other functions are being called, even when this is known at compile time. Ggcov attempts to extract this information after the fact by scanning the code in object files and correlating that with the .gcno files. This process can fail for several reasons, which will result in the data in the Call Graph and Call Butterfly windows being absent or incomplete, and the data in the Calls window not having the function names. Reasons for the include:

  • the object files are missing

  • the object files are for an architecture which is not yet supported by ggcov for the purposes of this feature (at time of writing, this feature is only supported on Linux x86 and x86-64).

  • calls through function pointers or C++ virtual functions are not known at compile time and cannot be calculated using the data available to ggcov.

• Code which puts multiple basic blocks on a line may not give the line coverage numbers you expect. In particular, when an entire loop is squashed into a single line, ggcov will report the number of times the loop ran plus one for each time the loop started, instead of the number of times the line as a whole ran.

• The Call Graph window uses a very primitive graph layout algorithm and may well loop or crash when given used on some programs.

Greg Banks 27 June 2020.