Taras’ Blog

Every once in a while people want to be analyze C code. If you are one of those people, checkout bug 494960. For GCC 4.3, you’ll need to update your patch queue. If you you followed the Dehydra install instructions do something like: cd gcc-4.3.0/.hg/patches hg pull -u cd ../.. hg qpush -a and rebuild [...]

I finally landed the remaining GCC patches needed to get a useful Dehydra without any of that gcc-patching pain! This week I also got some nice contributions from a contributor with a masterplan. Overall I expect cool things to happen once GCC 4.5 ships with plugin support. It’ll open up a jar of whoopass like [...]

I wrote Fennecmark to automate some of the tasks that I did manually while doing performance debugging. I tried to capture some of the “perceived performance” in numbers. My goal is to focus on user-visible areas of performance. Ideally it will enable us to track performance better to ensure that key features do not regress [...]

#static on irc.mozilla.org is now the correct irc channel for anything to do with static analysis. Codecon On Sunday, I will be presenting on Pork at codecon. I have been meaning to attend codecon since the days when P2P was considered cool, was not able to make it until this year. It is a historical [...]

After I wrote prcheck, I was surprised by the errors it found. I expected to find lots of cases of prbool variables having integers assigned into them. Indeed there were some of those, but the most frequent offenders were things like NS_ENSURE_SUCCESS(rv,rv); in methods with a PRBool return value. In this case (and many similar  [...]

A couple of months ago Stuart casually asked me to investigate Fennec performance for moving about a page, zooming and loading pages in general. Beta 1 contains the result of that: There is little to no hardware graphics acceleration on mobile arm device. That combined with low memory bandwidth results in painfully slow screen updates [...]

I love new programming toys and this week is a good one for those. Ever since I laid the foundations for Dehydra I’ve been dreaming of a world where I can quickly lookup a piece of code(say something that someone complains about on IRC), fix it, get it reviewed and pushed in the most efficient [...]

When I wrote the initial prototype of Dehydra I pondered how long it would take before it’s adopted by security guys. Unfortunately, until now take-up has been non-existent. Grep and Perl still seem to rule in that community even though the plain text approach restricts the range of possible security scans. Normally I would be [...]

I got tagged by Benjamin, so I better comply and get my blog memed. Rules Link back to your original tagger and list the rules in your post. Share seven facts about yourself. Tag some (seven?) people by leaving names and links to their blogs. Let them know they’ve been tagged. Seven Things In Soviet [...]

Static Analysis vs Performance Two months ago I got the feeling that I gotta take a break from static analysis and do something that obviously affects Firefox at runtime. Luckily that coincided with ramp-up on Fennec performance work. I find that I enjoy fixing existing code a lot more than other sorts of programming, so [...]