Taras’ Blog

LWN published an article about a tool that does refactoring of C code. Guess what, it’s yet another tool on top of a crappy C-parser that will never grok C well or even hope to support C++. To my great disappointment the author was not aware of my work on Pork. Clearly I have failed [...]

I’ve been running my prbool checker with nightly notifications for about a year now. There are some false positivies, but mostly it picks up real bugs. The checker pulls the blame source to try to guess who is responsible for the error, but so far it has only been emailing me. I’m going to make [...]

Recently I dusted off outparamdel to see if I can get some refactorings landed. About a year ago, with the great QueryInterface outparamdelling experiment we ended up with a smaller binary footprint and tiny performance gain, but that never landed due to us not wanting to break compatability yet. Ever since, outparamdel has been patiently [...]

Prcheck The trouble with prcheck and the automated prbool validation is that one can’t attach the giant patch it produces to bugzilla and expect it to get committed. So I am spending this week combing through prcheck output  and patch-bombing bugzilla with per-module patches. I find going through the errors manually to be a lot [...]

It is always frustrating to see a compiler complain about something trivial. It is especially annoying since most of the trivial complaints are trivial to fix automatically (eg. superfluous semicolon). I think this is a bigger problem in the static analysis industry. Vendors/researchers ship their tools with a superiority complex built-in. Most of the error [...]

New Tool: Prcheck – PRBool’s best friend Mozilla has a number boolean types and most of them are a form of an int. People expect them to behave like a bool, but since they can be assigned more than 1 value for true, this assumption can lead to bugs. Prcheck will mandate that prbools can [...]