Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Coverity and Velocity

I'm glad to see some gathering momentum around the coverity scans on the ruby-core list. I've posted a table of the 29 remaining possible defects there, and two of the possible defects in their entirity. (I'll be posting a third, which I think is a false positive) as soon as I'v finished this post.) The developers seem interested, and I know that a couple have registered with coverity.

I've been amazed to see the way the Perl and Python camps have attacked their defect list though. Perl is down to one verified defect and one uninspected possible defect (for an error rate of 0.004). Python has done even better and has no remaining defects (an error rate of 0.000). Wow!

Even more impressive is that there are eight projects with a defect rate of 0.000 and four more with a defect rate under 0.010. I hope we'll see Ruby joining them soon. It'll take some work to identify the false positives and fix the real problems, but we've made a start and it looks like people are interested in finishing the job.

Maybe once we get to zero defects, we can start chasing another big item — getting Ruby to run well under valgrind.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I appreciate you Ruby folks noticing the A work we've been doing over in Perl. We whacked a lot of the defects really quickly, and actually found a bug in the Coverity Prevent software where it misidentified something as a bug.

gnupate said...

Hey there Andy,
I'm always happy to point out someone doing well. I think there's some room for friendly competition between our camps, but there's no reason to pretend that the only good things are the ones that happen in Rubyland.