What It Does Not Do

What It Does Not Do

This tool is an early prototype, and the README says so: "the initial collection is intentionally basic". This page states the limits plainly, so the numbers are read for what they are.

Collection is pattern matching, not a protocol

Counters come from substring matches over log text — see Event Collection. There is no structured event stream between the runtime and the analyzer. Consequences:

• A change to a CoreTrace log message can change the counts without any behavior changing.
• Program output containing a matched substring is counted as a CoreTrace event.
• The counters overlap: a leak line is both an allocation_event and a leak_report, and heap-use-after-free is counted under bounds_errors although it is a lifetime error.

No per-event detail

The summary is counters plus, with --show-events, the raw lines. There is no per-allocation record, no call tree, no timeline, no correlation between an entry event and its matching exit.

No verdict, no report format

There is no exit-code gate on findings, and no JSON or SARIF output. The exit code reflects whether the tool ran and, in batch mode with --strict-test-exit, whether a test binary exited non-zero — not whether the run detected a memory error.

A pipeline wanting a verdict has to read the counters itself.

Single-process, single-run

One binary, one execution. No repeated runs, no input fuzzing, no coverage measurement, and no aggregation across invocations beyond batch mode summing its per-file summaries.

Platform

Development and the proof scripts target Unix-like systems. The Windows runtime work done in coretrace-compiler is not exercised here.

Status

The last functional change to this repository landed in July 2026 (the minimal execution tool, issue #4). issues/runtime-analyzer-implementation.md holds the implementation notes.

For mature analysis, the other CoreTrace tools are further along:

• coretrace-stack-analyzer — static stack and memory safety
• coretrace-concurrency-analyzer — concurrency rules
• coretrace-python-analyzer — Python security analysis
• coretrace — the orchestrator that runs them