Livejournal - dmalcolm.livejournal.com - dmalcolm
General Information:
Latest News:
Autodetecting reference-counting bugs: the video! 24 Mar 2012 | 10:39 am
I gave a talk at PyCon 2012 about my Python plugin for GCC - how this lowers the barrier for entry to potential GCC hackers, and how I've been using this to find reference-counting errors in Pytho...
Adding a spellchecking pass to GCC, using Python 1 Oct 2011 | 06:16 am
LWN recently posted an interesting article on writing GCC plugins, showing how to add a spellchecking pass to the compiler. I thought this was a neat example, so I had a go at porting it from C to us...
Automatically detecting reference-count bugs in Python extension modules 16 Jul 2011 | 09:32 am
[ For the tl;dr version, scroll down to see the pretty screenshots :) ] I've been working on a static analysis tool to automatically detect reference-count bugs in C Python extension code. (see my e...
Verifying the more awkward parts of the CPython API 25 Jun 2011 | 12:45 pm
I've been running my Python extension module static analyser over CPython itself (the latest in the 2.7 hg branch, specifically). I'm pleased to say that the project's mailing list received the first...
Static analysis of CPython extensions, using a new GCC plugin 24 Jun 2011 | 09:50 am
I've been looking at ways to improve the quality of Python extensions written in C. CPython provides a great C API that makes it easy to relatively easy to integrate C and C++ libraries with Python c...
PyCon US talks on memory usage and gdb 13 Mar 2011 | 05:20 pm
Various people have been asking for the slides to my PyCon US talks, so here goes. "Dude, Where's My RAM?" - A deep dive into how Python uses memory Slides can be found here in ODP format (2.7M) and...
FUDcon talk: Different Species of Python 30 Jan 2011 | 02:46 pm
I'm at FUDCon in Tempe, Arizona. Today I gave a talk entitled "Different Species of Python", comparing the various implementations of the Python language, and how we might better support them within ...
Python 3 support for GTK via PyGI: proof-of-concept 21 Apr 2010 | 11:47 am
I spent much of last week taking part in a GTK/Python hackfest. My particular interest is in Python 3 support, so I spent some time helping John Ehresman clean up pygobject, and some time with John P...
What variability exists within proposed updates to the Fedora package collection? 10 Mar 2010 | 07:53 am
There's been a lot of discussion, and alas, some bad feeling, I think, about trying to balance updates versus testing in Fedora. I believe there are many areas where we can mitigate risk for the user...
Update on 2to3c 22 Feb 2010 | 06:35 am
My 2to3c tool now has a website: https://fedorahosted.org/2to3c/ I haven't yet sanely packaged it (I'm working on that) but I have done some work since my last blog post: - It's somewhat more robust ...
