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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Mozilla @ SJCE : Static Analysis projects

It has been a very long time since I posted anything about the Mozilla related activities going on at my college SJCE, Mysore. That in no way means absence of any activity. In a previous post I mentioned that along with the attempt to introduce Mozilla as a standard course I was working to get the current final year students (who are enrolled under the larger VTU University) to start working on Mozilla, using their final semester project as a means. Well I am happy to say that this has materialized. 8 final semester students from CS expressed interest in working with the Mozilla community as part of their final year project and it's been a month nearly since they started their work. Here is a brief write up about that.

As is with most of the Computer Science students in India approaching the Mozilla community, these 8 students also wanted to do something related to compilers. The JS engine and static analysis are two projects in Mozilla which would come under the compiler banner. These 8 students wanted to work on something substantial which can be presented by two teams of 4 students each as their final semester project. So the bugs that they would be working on had to be related. This was possible only with static analysis as there are a lot of related tasks available. Also static analysis would be something new to the students and it would give them an opportunity to understand the internals of the compiler (GCC here) like the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and other representations of the code. Moreover the static analysis APIs are exposed in JS and hence the analysis scripts would be written in JS. That way students would learn JS also. Above all these students would be doing something genuinely new.

The students could not be asked to start working on the bugs directly. They were new to open source development, the tools used there like the bugzilla, using email as a formal medium of communication, the source control system (to add to the complexity Mozilla now uses a distributed RCS - Mercurial [hg]), using IRC, the linux development environment etc. It has been these things that the students have been learning for this part month or so. This learning has been in the form of accomplishing the tasks which form the prerequisites for the actual static analysis work. These are things like downloading gcc and mozilla sources from the ftp hosts and from the mercurial repository respectively, applying the mozilla specific patches to gcc for plugin support etc, etc... These are all listed here. Note that some things like installing all the dependency packages for building these applications from sources, learning to use the linux command line itself and others are not on that page but were new to these students nonetheless.

All the students have been putting in substantial effort and have picked up the traits of an open source hacker pretty soon. We have had a few IRC meetings and a lot of formal communications over emails. In parallel we were also working towards shortlisting 8 static analysis bugs. Based on the feasibility of the bug being completed by an amateur developer within a span of 2.5 months and based on the students' interest we finally decided on these 8 bugs :
  1. Bug 525063 - Analysis to produce an error on uninitialized class members
  2. Bug 500874 - Static analysis to find heap allocations that could be stack allocations
  3. Bug 500866 - Warn about base classes with non-virtual destructors
  4. Bug 500864 - Warn on passing large objects by value
  5. Bug 528206 - Warn on unnecessary float->double conversion
  6. Bug 526309 - Basic check for memory leaks
  7. Bug 542364 - Create a static analysis script for detecting reentrancy on a function
  8. Bug 500875 - Find literal strings/arrays/data that should be const static
These tasks are good, challenging and provide an opportunity to understand compilers very closely.

Currently the students have downloaded gcc, applied the patches, built it along with the dehydra plugin support and are ready to run static analysis on the mozilla code. They are now trying to run simple analysis scripts like listing all classes in mozilla code and all classes and their corresponding member functions. It is still quite a long way to go, but it has been a real good start. Let's wait and watch what great feats are in the pipeline.

I hope to keep this blog updated at the same pace at which the students are working.

Good luck to the students. :-)