Frama-C A discussion I often have addresses the question of whether a compiler¹ can warn for all possible illegal actions a program could take at run-time within a specific, well-understood family² . (1) or some other piece of software that receives a program as input and, in finite time, does something...
Read MoreThere is no “sign extension” in C. Please stop referring to “sign extension” in C programs. In assembly, there is such a thing as “sign extension” Sign-extend is an assembly instruction say movsx %al %ebx to transfer the contents of a narrow register say %al to a wide register say...
Read MoreA previous post discussed the nature of uninitialized and indeterminate memory throughout the C standards. The argument was “avoid using uninitialized data even if you think you know what you are doing; you may be right but regardless your compiler might think it knows what you are doing and be...
Read MoreQuotes on the Internet In 2012, Lukas Mathis took a quote out of the context of a blog post by Marco Arment and ran with it. The result was a though-provoking essay. Key quote: This is a sentiment you often hear from people: casual users only need «entry-level» devices. Even...
Read MoreBlink as seen from the inside As you have undoubtedly heard if you follow at all this sort of thing, as of April 3, Google is forking WebKit. Its Chrome browser will henceforth rely on its own variation of the popular rendering engine, Blink. This is big news. If I...
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