Autodetecting reference-counting bugs: the video!: dmalcolm

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:

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!

I've also finally succumbed to the inevitable and joined github: you can fork the plugin here (this is just a clone I keep synchronized with the Fedora Hosted repository)

Autodetecting reference-counting bugs: the video!