C Verification Tools

Ways to verify the C extension you're working on isn't broken.

1. ASAN

ASAN is an address sanitizer that detects memory access to unallocated or previously-freed memory.

Bryan O'Sullivan describes using it with Mercurial here.

2. cpychecker

cpychecker checks for common errors in cpython extensions like over-retaining or under-retaining a PyObject. It seems to be easily confused, but it was extremely helpful and found a lot of little problems in late 2014.

Augie ran it vaguely like this:

for file in $(hg files 'set:**.c') ; do                                         
  $GCC_PYTHON_PLUGIN/gcc-with-cpychecker -c $(python-config --includes) $file                   
done

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