LCA: Static analysis with GCC plugins
Feb 10, 2010, 03:02 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jonathan Corbet)
"Taras Glek works for Mozilla, but he is not a browser hacker;
instead, he works on GCC and other tools aimed at making the
browser development process better. It is, he says, a good job.
While carrying out his duties, Taras has been able to put a new GCC
feature to work in ways which may prove to be useful well beyond
Mozilla.
"Development tools are important; they can help us to produce
software more quickly and with far fewer problems. Unfortunately,
Taras says, we are stuck in the stone age of software development,
using tools from the 1970's. Our code base is growing, though, to
the point that developers often cannot understand the entirety of
even a single application. We need some way to amplify our
capabilities so that we can continue to make more powerful
applications; static analysis tools can bring some of those
capabilities.
"Static analysis, in essence, treats the code as data which is
then the subject of further analysis. It has often been seen as a
backwater, an area of primarily academic interest. When static
analysis tools have found their way into more common use, it has
generally been in their ability to find certain classes of bugs.
But there's more that can be done with these tools: finding API
abuse, generating library bindings, improved code base
visualization, and more. Static analysis has been put to use with
Mozilla to find dead code; thousands of lines of code have been
found to be completely unused, despite the fact that engineers were
putting their time into maintaining it."
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