Top all-time · #8572
Confessions of a Wall Street Programmer
Personal blog · btorpey.github.io/blogprogrammingsystems
Confessions of a Wall Street Programmer is a personal blog at btorpey.github.io about programming and systems. Since 2014, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “Measuring Latency in Linux (2014)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on static analysis and memory-error tools, comparing clang/gcc sanitizers with Valgrind and covering custom allocators. One commenter says it quickly explained address sanitizers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I’ve recently been dipping my toes in the very deep water that is “undefined behavior” in C and C++, and the more I learn about it, the scarier it …
Most-linked posts?
- Measuring Latency in Linux (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-07-05
- /blog/categories/static-analysis/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-09-30
- /blog/2014/03/27/using-clangs-address-sanitizer/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-17
- Building clang on RedHat2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-30
What Hacker News says?
My two cents, fwiw: http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2014/09/23/into-the-void/
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/23/into-the-void/
on “Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (2012)”Submitted Measuring Latency in Linux (2014) as a story · 129 points
HN discussionI wrote a few posts on this topic that may be helpful: http://btorpey.github.io/blog/categories/static-analysis/
Comment linking /blog/categories/static-analysis/
on “C++ Ecosystem: Compilers, IDEs, Tools, Testing”Submitted Memory Checking as a story · 50 points
HN discussionNice article! If you're interested in clocks on Linux, you might also find this article useful (shameless plug): http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2014/02/18/clock-sources-in-li...
Comment linking /blog/2014/02/18/clock-sources-in-linux/
on “Running a database on EC2? Your clock could be slowing you down”Submitted We Don't Need No Stinkin' Databases as a story · 41 points
HN discussionOn a related note: http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2017/05/10/join/
Comment linking /blog/2017/05/10/join/
on “Shell Magic: Set Operations with uniq”Submitted Moving from CentOS to Ubuntu as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf Jenkins works for you, great. It does seem to support both clang and cppcheck, although not PVS-Studio (which is one of the better tools out there in my experience). Personally, I'm happier with plain old text files that can be manipulated with awk, grep, etc., can be databased if needed (since they're csv files) -- and can also be compared using my all-time favorite software, Beyond Compare. ( http://btorpey.git…
Comment linking /blog/2013/01/29/beyond-compare/
on “Scaling Static Analyses at Facebook”Submitted Building clang on RedHat as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think one of the unstated problems with static analysis is just keeping track of the results. I know that when I started working with these tools, it was a huge PITA just dealing with the various output files. That's why I created tools to convert the output from different tools into a common CSV format that can be databased and used to compare output from different tools, or from different versions of the code (e…
Comment linking /blog/categories/static-analysis/
on “Scaling Static Analyses at Facebook”Submitted Measuring Latency in Linux as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere is a good serie of articles on static analysis tools : http://btorpey.github.io/blog/categories/static-analysis/
Comment linking /blog/categories/static-analysis/
on “In-Depth: Static Code Analysis (2011)”Submitted Danger, Will Robinson: Undefined Behavior as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHe doesn't use the term "Valgrind-like". He only talks about Valgrind, which he calls a "great tool" (he's right!). But he is evangelizing sanitizers, in clang and gcc, which are relatively new. And, yes, they do work by adding instrumentation at compile-time, which allows them to be much faster than Valgrind (which does all its analysis at run-time). See: http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2014/03/27/using-clangs-addres…
Comment linking /blog/2014/03/27/using-clangs-address-sanitizer/
on “Building better software with better tools: sanitizers vs. Valgrind”Submitted Running C++ static analysis tools on OpenMAMA middleware as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe author is correct that trying to get modern toolchains on older systems (like RH6) is a real pain. But sometimes there's no real choice -- some applications value reliability above all else, and tend to be deployed on RH where its relative stability is a feature, not a bug. I've written about this ( http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2015/01/02/building-clang/ ), specifically in the context of getting clang running o…
Comment linking /blog/2015/01/02/building-clang/
on “Newer C++ features can create a lot of system yak shaving”Submitted Measuring Latency in Linux as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI just went from "wtf is an address sanitizer" to "what's the difference between this and valgrind" to an ASAN acolyte in about 1 minute. http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2014/03/27/using-clangs-addres... Article mentions JVM noise, but my actual experience is with python noise. Good riddance; this is going into my CI test suite today.
Comment linking /blog/2014/03/27/using-clangs-address-sanitizer/
on “Custom Allocators Demystified”Submitted Mo' Static as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in static analysis, you may find this series of articles useful: http://btorpey.github.io/blog/2016/11/12/even-mo-static/ . FWIW, I did not see a lot of false positives in the tests I did with clang. On the contrary, I would say that clang tends to be rather conservative, and doesn't report warnings unless they are almost certainly bugs. I'd certainly be interested in what others think -- if so…
Comment linking /blog/2016/11/12/even-mo-static/
on “Running Clang-Tidy on the Linux Kernel”Submitted Python pretty-printing in gdb as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> To my knowledge, neither Infer or Clang has ever been compared to other static analysis tools in an article similar to this. I beg to differ: http://btorpey.github.io/blog/categories/static-analysis/
Comment linking /blog/categories/static-analysis/
on “Evaluating the performance of open source static analysis tools [pdf]”