Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

At the job that I had before starting Karelia Software, around the turn of the century, our software engineering department had a fairly intense set of coding guidelines. Not just the formatting rules that people had to follow (e.g. no K&R braces, indentation rules, etc.) but also many guidelines that were about programming defensively. The idea was that you had to write code that was less likely to have errors in it, and was less likely to have errors introduced later on.

Although the guidelines were originally written for C++ (for old-school Mac development), a lot of the rules transferred easily to Java (as did the many of the developers!), and then, with me, when I went "indie," to Objective-C.

I don't have a copy of that document, alas, but I did manage to internalize many of those rules, so that it became habit for me (for the most part), and I've been able to add on to some of those rules to be specific to Objective-C/Cocoa programming.

A few days ago, I found out about the LLVM/Clang Static Analyzer — "Clang" for short — from a number of developers on Twitter (where I am "danwood", BTW, and a lot more active there than on this blog these days). I ran our codebase (Sandvox, along with the iMedia Browser and other bits of code) through the analyzer, and what I found was very interesting: Most of the bugs that it found, if we had better applied the guidelines we've been trying to follow, would not have been there. I consider this proof of the utility of these kinds of guidelines, which I'll list later on here.

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I make my living off the evening news
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry
— Don Henley, "Dirty Laundry"

So we are close to releasing Sandvox 1.5 over in Karelia-land. But there are a few exceptions and crashes that people are getting, and we're out of ideas on how to diagnose them. (Of course, they don't happen to us!)

So Karl suggested posting the backtraces and seeing if any of our astute readers (of the Developer persuasion) had some ideas. Can those of you not daunted by this prospect take a look and see if anything comes to mind, any thoughts that you might have to help track down the issues at hand? I have some good juicy backtraces with symbols, the trick is figuring out why these crashes or exceptions happened. (For the crashes I am just including the backtraces but I could upload the full crash reports if people want...)

I'd love to hear your comments in the comments section, or you can drop me a line: dwood at the venerable domain of karelia, in the kingdom of Dot Com.

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