Autodetecting reference-counting bugs: the video!
I gave a talk at PyCon 2012 about my Python plugin for GCC - how this lowers the barrier for entry to potential GCC hackers, and how I've been using this to find reference-counting errors in Python C extension modules.
A video of the talk can be seen here:
http://pyvideo.org/video/648/static-analysis-of-python-extension-modules-using
or on YouTube here.
The slides are here.
We had a mini-sprint after the talk, and another later on in the main sprints, covering these topics:
A video of the talk can be seen here:
http://pyvideo.org/video/648/static-analysis-of-python-extension-modules-using
or on YouTube here.
The slides are here.
We had a mini-sprint after the talk, and another later on in the main sprints, covering these topics:
- getting the plugin to build on OS X (using MacPorts' build of gcc-4.6.1): this works, but needed some compat patching around some of the differences between glibc and OS X's libc (also case-sensitivity of filenames).
- improving the static analysis engine: currently it takes the simplistic approach of trying to generate all traces of execution through the function in a big tree, which suffers from exponentially explosions. I'm hoping the insides can be reworked to implement an iterative solver that can handle loops more robustly (data flow equations)
- improving the HTML error reports that the analyzer generates. More on this to follow!
