Re: contributing & bound-checks

[Bernardo Innocenti <bernie at develer dot com>]

rv wrote:
> foreword: Hi, newbie-to-mailing-lists here so my apologies in advance if 
> there's some netiquette I'm missing.

I'm a GCC newbie myself, with just a few months-worth of experience,
mainly in the backends area.


> I've looked to bound-checking projects/patches for gcc but couldnt find 
> anything satisfactory for C++

I would call this an ambitious project, indeed.  AFAIK, in the past
there have been a few experimental projects to add run-time checking
of array bounds for C and C++.

The tree-ssa branch, recently merged into mainline, comes with
Mudflap, a library and compiler pass to provide bounds-checking
for debugging purposes.  I can't comment on its quality since
so far I've never compiled anything with -fmudflap.

If you'd like to hack into GCC, I'd suggest you to try easier
projects first.  No matter how skilled a programmer you are,
GCC is a huge project and it requires several months just to
get some confidence with the infrastructure and codebase.

This page lists a few open projects, some of which may be
interesting to you:

 http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/

There are also many open bugs that could use some help.
Look in bugzilla for some inspiration.  Just don't pick
any of the oldest bugs because they're very likely to be
the hardest to fix :-)

--
 // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/