• bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> Jan 03 2011

bearophile <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

Brad Roberts:

 I haven't read the paper, probably should,


There are papers about Coccinelle, but the PDF I have linked is just a pack of
few slides :-)


 but is it counting found, fixed, introduced? Each of those are different data
points.


The section in the slides says "Finding and fixing !x&y bugs using Coccinelle",
and at the end it says "Over 450 patches created using Coccinelle accepted into
Linux", so I think it's talking about bugs fixed.


 Also of interest would be
 any indicator of total bug counts during that same period.  We're talking about
 a LONG period of time here (5-6 years) and a rather large code base that does a
 lot of low level bit manipulations.


Surely the total count of Linux bugs in those years is very high, so the
percentage of !x&y bugs is very low. On the other hand to catch higher level
bugs you need a very refined type system, that doesn't seem to go well with the
current D Zen.

I don't have such numbers, but I think it's not too much hard to find how many
bugs have being fixed in that time in Linux. The bug trackers are online.

Bye,
bearophile