[Python-Dev] Coverity Scan (original) (raw)

Eli Bendersky eliben at gmail.com
Fri Jul 26 17:13:03 CEST 2013

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 7:29 AM, Christian Heimes <christian at python.org>wrote:

Am 26.07.2013 14:56, schrieb Eli Bendersky: > Just a quick question - is there a chance to convince Coverity to detect > Python refcounting leaks in C API code :-) ? This could be useful not > only for Python but for extensions too. As it stands now, Coverity's > leak detection is Python must be pretty weak because almost everything > is done via PyObject refcounts.

Coverity is able to detect some cases of refcount leaks. I don't know if the software is able to keep track of all reference counts. But it understands missing PyDECREF() in error branches. For example: PyObject *n = PyLongFromLong(0); PyObject *u = PyUnicodeFromString("example"); if (u == NULL) { return NULL; /* Coverity detects that 'n' leaks memory */ }

Interesting.

I was thinking of something more general though. Especially if we can mark function arguments and return values as stealing references / creating new ones / etc, many many common refcount bugs can be detected with static analysis. This is definitely research-y, probably too much for our current stage of relationship with Coverity :)

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