Taras’ Blog

I was pleased to see Mozilla static analysis mentioned on lwn. Yes indeed, the mailing list has been pretty dead (most of our communication happens on irc.mozilla.org #static). I completely failed to build a community around my static analysis tools. Perhaps more people will try Dehydra now that it’s getting into Debian. The hydras are [...]

I was invited to present a Galois tech talk on Mozilla static analysis. It was really cool to give a talk locally to such an expert audience. I was surprised to discover a vibrant Programming Languages + Analysis community in Portland. Edward Z. Yang did an excellent write-up on the talk. PLDi Robert O’Callahan mentioned [...]

Cool thing about static analysis is that you can ask painful-for-humans questions about your codebase AND have them answered. Here are two that got answered by Ehren: Where do function bodies continue after return statements (ie obviously dead/broken code)? Bug 535646. How many functions in Mozilla could/should be marked static? Bug 536427. Awesome!

I spent couple of days fixing the remaining test-suite failures on GCC 4.5 trunk for Dehydra. Since the last time I looked into this, GCC went from crashing all over the place to only crashing if I did something bad. It was nice to discover that as a result of switching to 4.5 Dehydra users [...]

Last week I was in Canada to present at FSOSS with David Humphrey on awesome Mozilla Tools: Dehydra, DXR, Pork, etc. I think we managed to convey the message regarding what a sad affair that current developer development tools are. General-Purpose Dehydra Scripts Dehydra grew out of Mozilla’s constant need to figure out what is [...]

While writing C++ sometimes one wishes that one could squeeze a little more out of the type system. In this particular case, Zack Weinberg (layout-refactorer extraordinaire), wanted to make sure that certain methods always get overridden in derived classes. Unfortunately, in that particular design, those methods were not pure-virtual. At this point most C++ hackers [...]

Lately I have been focusing on optimizing Fennec startup on a delightfully inadequate platform: Windows Mobile. More on fascinating startup, performance problems and solutions later. As a result I have been doing relatively little static analysis stuff. The main reason for taking a break is that I feel that I went from having no way [...]

Are you are a developer who has been frustrated by the pathetic state of the art in code search engines and code browsing experience on the web? Have you been longing for being able to view code with more aid than coloured words? David Humphrey just released his DXR bombshell. The “basic” concept behind DXR [...]

I moved dehydra to a more official location, please update your scripts and hg settings. New dehydra url: http://hg.mozilla.org/rewriting-and-analysis/dehydra/ Pork got reshuffled during the move, it’s now 2 repositories. oink is dead. It now depends on current versions of flex (as opposed to flex-old) and features a cleaned up buildsystem. New way to checkout pork: [...]

How well are you packing your structs? Arpad asked that question with an awesome Dehydra script and came up with an interesting list. GCC 4.3.3 Is supported GCC 4.3.3(4.3.[210] worked) broke C++ compatibility in the headers used by Dehydra. Zach pointed out that passing -fpermissive to g++ solves the problem. Sorry to all the people [...]