<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/7/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Ben Chelf</b> <<a href="mailto:ben@coverity.com">ben@coverity.com</a>> wrote:</span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Putting on my idealistic hat and remembering back my grad school days, I<br>think we're on to something very new in the world of source code<br>analysis. I really just want every developer to use source code analysis<br>while they write code (remember, idealistic :)). We got a lot of the
<br>good publicity in the research lab because there existed this big open<br>source OS that we could test our theories on. So from that angle, I<br>think it makes sense for Coverity to have a strong relationship with the
<br>open source community since that community has been helping us pretty<br>much since day 1. This project is just the next step in that...it's<br>certainly not the last.<br><br>There's plenty more to do to target every developer.
</blockquote><div><br>Well, as long as we're talking idealistically, I wonder how easy it would be to add reference-counting tracking to Coverity Prevent. Python, Perl and (I believe) PHP all have their own kind of refcounting, but the base semantics are pretty much the same: a function can return a new or a borrowed reference, and it can borrow or steal references passed to it. Without having seen how Prevent works, it feels to me like it would be a small addition to keep track of these application-specific details. Or, perhaps more generic, add a few markers to keep track of them; in Python, you'd only have to mark Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF, and possibly manual fidgeting with an objects' refcount (which is hopefully extremely rare.)
<br></div><br></div>I say 'idealistically', though, because I don't know how much business sense it makes to cater to refcounting mechanisms.<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Thomas Wouters <<a href="mailto:thomas@python.org">
thomas@python.org</a>><br><br>Hi! I'm a .signature virus! copy me into your .signature file to help me spread!