Last week I was in Berlin at the GNOME DX hackfest. My goal for the hackfest was to do further work on the fledgling gnome-clang, and work out ways of integrating it into GNOME. There were several really fruitful discussions about GIR, static analysis, Clang ASTs, and integration into Builder which have really helped flesh out my plans for gnome-clang.

The idea we have settled on is to use static analysis more pervasively in the GNOME build process. I will be looking into setting up a build bot to do static analysis on all GNOME modules, with the dual aims of catching bugs and improving the static analyser. Eventually I hope the analysis will become fast enough and accurate enough to be enabled on developers’ machines — but that’s a while away yet.

(For those who have no idea what gnome-clang is: it’s a plugin for the Clang static analyser I’ve been working on, which adds GLib- and GObject-specific checks to the static analysis process.)

One key feature I was working on throughout the hackfest was support for GVariant format string checking, which has now landed in git master. This will automatically check variadic parameters against a static GVariant format string in calls to g_variant_new(), g_variant_get() and other similar methods.

For example, this can statically catch when you forget to add one of the elements:

/*
 * Expected a GVariant variadic argument of type ‘int’ but there wasn’t one.
 *         floating_variant = g_variant_new ("(si)", "blah");
 *                                           ^
 */
{
	floating_variant = g_variant_new ("(si)", "blah");
}

Or the inevitable time you forget the tuple brackets:

/*
 * Unexpected GVariant format strings ‘i’ with unpaired arguments. If using multiple format strings, they should be enclosed in brackets to create a tuple (e.g. ‘(si)’).
 *         floating_variant = g_variant_new ("si", "blah", 56);
 *                                           ^
 */
{
	floating_variant = g_variant_new ("si", "blah", 56);
}

After Zeeshan did some smoketesting of it (and I fixed the bugs he found), I think gnome-clang is ready for slightly wider usage. If you’re interested, please install it and try it out! Instructions are on its home page. Let me know if you have any problems getting it running — I want it to be as easy to use as possible.

Another topic I discussed with Ryan and Christian at the hackfest was the idea of a GMainContext visualiser and debugger. I’ve got some ideas for this, and will hopefully find time to work on them in the near future.

Huge thanks to Chris Kühl and Endocode for the use of their offices and their unrivalled hospitality. Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for kindly sponsoring my accommodation; and thanks to my employer, Collabora, for letting me take community days to attend the hackfest.