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Re: [csmith-dev] feature request: generate memory unsafe code



"Mission creep" is a bit strong. Csmith is a random program generator and memory unsafety is an almost trivial variation on the existing theme.

However I am back from PLDI with several ideas that will certainly count as mission creep. Also Yang says he's asking his nVidia supervisors if he can contribute back the CUDA-generation work he will do over the summer.

I'd be interested to have the discussion you mention, but the conclusion I had privately come to is that Csmith is probably just going to become (even more) a big crappy pile of features and that's OK. The fix will be to redesign and reimplement it.

John




On 06/08/2011 07:17 PM, Eric Eide wrote:
	John>  The purpose of these features is to test static and dynamic
	John>  memory safety checking tools.

The words that come to my mind are "mission creep."

This sounds pejorative, but I don't really mean it to be so.  Testing the
checkers is good.  It's just not what Csmith is designed to do now.

For me, the more general question is how to best deal with the increasing
number of options that we and other people want.  I think that this requires
some thinking, before the options get completely out of hand.

Eric.