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  12        <a href="">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
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  20   <div class="title">Two projects that have improved the quality of free software a lot</div>
  21   <div class="date">2009-05-02 15:00</div>
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  23 <p>There are two software projects that have had huge influence on the
  24 quality of free software, and I wanted to mention both in case someone
  25 do not yet know them.</p>
  26
  27 <p>The first one is <a href="http://valgrind.org/">valgrind</a>, a
  28 tool to detect and expose errors in the memory handling of programs.
  29 It is easy to use, all one need to do is to run 'valgrind program',
  30 and it will report any problems on stdout.  It is even better if the
  31 program include debug information.  With debug information, it is able
  32 to report the source file name and line number where the problem
  33 occurs.  It can report things like 'reading past memory block in file
  34 X line N, the memory block was allocated in file Y, line M', and
  35 'using uninitialised value in control logic'.  This tool has made it
  36 trivial to investigate reproducible crash bugs in programs, and have
  37 reduced the number of this kind of bugs in free software a lot.
  38
  39 <p>The second one is
  40 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverity">Coverity</a> which is
  41 a source code checker.  It is able to process the source of a program
  42 and find problems in the logic without running the program.  It
  43 started out as the Stanford Checker and became well known when it was
  44 used to find bugs in the Linux kernel.  It is now a commercial tool
  45 and the company behind it is running
  46 <a href="http://www.scan.coverity.com/">a community service</a> for the
  47 free software community, where a lot of free software projects get
  48 their source checked for free.  Several thousand defects have been
  49 found and fixed so far.  It can find errors like 'lock L taken in file
  50 X line N is never released if exiting in line M', or 'the code in file
  51 Y lines O to P can never be executed'.  The projects included in the
  52 community service project have managed to get rid of a lot of
  53 reliability problems thanks to Coverity.</p>
  54
  55 <p>I believe tools like this, that are able to automatically find
  56 errors in the source, are vital to improve the quality of software and
  57 make sure we can get rid of the crashing and failing software we are
  58 surrounded by today.</p>
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