Clang, LLVM and Gnome @Guadec 2013

Bruno Cardoso — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 11:52:43 +0000

Today I gave a talk at the GUADEC 2013 conference, the slides can be downloaded here. . The presentation covered the basics about LLVM: what it is, why use it, how to use the tools and how to benefit from it. It was aimed at providing knowledge about the tool to the projects under the Gnome umbrella. Besides the benefits discussed in the talk, the static analyzer results for each Gnome subproject can be seen here:

Highlights and considerations: Divide by zero reports in gstreamer and gtk+, and Dereference of null pointer reports all around. It is worth to mention that no memory leak bugs were found, very likely because memory allocation functions such as malloc() uses in gnome related projects are done via glib’s g_malloc() versions. There’s a simple hack that enables the tracking of g_mallocs, and that will probably uncover several memory leaks all around, just a guess

I mentioned in the talk that some gnome applications failed execution while using the memory sanitizer -fsanitize=memory compiler flag, it seems to be something related to glib’s instrospection implementation, the log can be found here and glib experts are welcome to comment about it.

Besides the technical part, the event is being held in Brno, Czech Republic, a great city with lots of cool sites. Thanks to the Gnome Foundation for the opportunity and specially to Fabiano Fidêncio and Rui Matos, very receptive and amazing guys!

UPDATE: recorded video lecture available for download.

staticanalyzer – Bruno C Lopes

Clang, LLVM and Gnome @Guadec 2013