Open Source for Developers

Report from the virtual ISO C++ meetings in 2020 (core language)

May 7, 2021

C++ standardization was dramatically different in 2020 from earlier years. The business of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee all took place virtually, much like everything else during this pandemic. This article summarizes the C++ standardization proposals before the Core and Evolution Working Groups last year. Core language The C++ Core Working Group (CWG) […]

Automating the testing process for SystemTap, Part 1: Test automation with libvirt and Buildbot

May 6, 2021

Over the past year, I have been implementing an automated infrastructure to test the SystemTap project and to collect and analyze the test results. SystemTap is a scripting language for creating instrumentation to observe a live running Linux kernel and user-space applications. The SystemTap language translator produces Linux kernel modules. These modules depend on internal […]

Detecting memory management bugs with GCC 11, Part 2: Deallocation functions

May 5, 2021

The first half of this article described dynamic memory allocation in C and C++, along with some of the new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 11 features that help you detect errors in dynamic allocation. This second half completes the tour of GCC 11 features in this area and explains where the detection mechanism might report […]

The GDB developer's GNU Debugger tutorial, Part 1: Getting started with the debugger

April 30, 2021

This article is the first in a series demonstrating how to use the GNU Debugger (GDB) effectively to debug applications in C and C++. If you have limited or no experience using GDB, this series will teach you how to debug your code more efficiently. If you are already a seasoned professional using GDB, perhaps […]

Detecting memory management bugs with GCC 11, Part 1: Understanding dynamic allocation

April 30, 2021

Memory management bugs are among the hardest to find in C and C++ programs, and are a favorite target of exploits. These errors are difficult to debug because they involve three distinct sites in a program that are often far apart and obscured by the use of pointers: memory allocation, the use of the allocated […]

Solving the mystery of hanging character set conversions in glibc's iconv utility

April 23, 2021

Website visitors don’t typically consider character encoding and conversion when accessing digital content. However, engineers have been dealing with conversion issues since users started transferring strings from one computer to another. Today, when more than 95 percent of all web pages use UTF-8, converting data between character sets might seem less relevant. However, it continues […]

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