I gave a talk at PyCon 2012 on Friday 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 3rd-party Python C extensions.
A video of the talk can be seen here: http://pyvideo.org/video/648/static-analysis-of-python-extension-modules-using The slides are here: http://fedorapeople.org/~dmalcolm/presentations/pycon-2012/StaticAnalysisOfPythonExtensionModulesUsingGcc.html We had a mini-sprint after the talk, and another yesterday 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). I'll try to merge the changes once I've got back from PyCon - 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: I have lots of ideas on this, which I need to sketch out. I'm hoping to decouple the analysis engine from the presentation layer, to make it easier for a graphic designer who knows CSS, JS, etc to hack up a report generator that gives better readability and aesthetics compared to my crudely functional HTML+canvas abominations. Hope this is interesting Dave
