blog/archive/2009/05/05.rss

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   4                 <title>Petter Reinholdtsen - Entries from May 2009</title>
   5                 <description>Entries from May 2009</description>
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  10                 <title>Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</title>
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  13                 <pubDate>Sat, 2 May 2009 15:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
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  15 &lt;p&gt;There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
  16 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
  17 do not yet know them.&lt;/p&gt;
  18
  19 &lt;p&gt;The first one is &lt;a href=&quot;http://valgrind.org/&quot;&gt;valgrind&lt;/a&gt;, a
  20 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
  21 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run &#39;valgrind program&#39;,
  22 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
  23 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
  24 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
  25 occurs.  It can report things like &#39;reading past memory block in file
  26 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M&#39;, and
  27 &#39;using uninitialised value in control logic&#39;.  This tool has made it
  28 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
  29 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
  30
  31 &lt;p&gt;The second one is
  32 &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity&quot;&gt;Coverity&lt;/a&gt; which is
  33 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
  34 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
  35 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
  36 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
  37 and the company behind it is running
  38 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scan.coverity.com/&quot;&gt;a community service&lt;/a&gt; for the
  39 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
  40 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
  41 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like &#39;lock L taken in file
  42 X line N is never released if exiting in line M&#39;, or &#39;the code in file
  43 Y lines O to P can never be executed&#39;.  The projects included in the
  44 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
  45 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.&lt;/p&gt;
  46
  47 &lt;p&gt;I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
  48 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
  49 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
  50 surrounded by today.&lt;/p&gt;
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