Stanford Checker

[Patrik Stridvall]

> On Tue, 5 Jun 2001 David.Goodenough at dga.co.uk wrote:
> > but has anyone thought of running these against Wine?
> 
> I'm not sure if it'd do that much good. They're currently working on
> checking the XFree86 tree (see the Xpert mailing list archives on
> www.XFree86.org if you want), without a lot of big results 
> yet. From what
> I gather, this tool has very limited and context-dependent 
> intelligence,

Perhaps. But see below.

> and is not conceptually very different from what a glorified 
> version of
> Patrik's tools/winapi_check script might be, if given enough people
> working on it.

Not quite.

winapi_check is
1. Specifically written for Wine
2. A syntax analyzer
3. Mostly ad hoc.

The Stanford checker on the other hand is
1. Generalized for all C/C++ applications
2. A semantic analyzer
3. Formalized with a script language

The way I choose when designing winapi_check was the
one of the easiest ways and the way they choose is one
of the hardest.  So just calling it is glorified
winapi_check  gives the Stanford people too little credit.

Anyway the way Stanford choose is really _very_ hard so 
what I fear is that they had to make some limiting
decisions that makes their tool much less useful.

That said regardless of how good the Stanford checker really
will be I'm pretty there will be a lot of things that
will be _much_ easier checked by writting a script
for the Stanford checker than by extending winapi_check,
because they have fundamentally different design
philosofies.

However don't underestimate winapi_check either.
There is a lot of things that can quite easilt be
checked by adding some clever perl pattern, if:s and
a little state. Syntax level matching is not that
bad just a little more crude.

If somebody have something that he want to be automatically
checked, please post it on the list and I will see what
I can do.