Holiday boredom...

I don't have any plans for the Christmas holidays, and Helsinki is at just the right temperature to make doing anything outside really difficult. Some of the snow has melted and frozen into ice, making it feel a lot like walking on broken glass: physically and emotionally; I stopped counting the number of unintentional acrobatics after about the 5th or 6th time sliding in some way.

I might implement zlib compression for network traffic in my engine, which should only be a few dozen lines... or something a bit more interesting; stencil shadow volumes could still use more optimization, or some SIMD stuff...

There are at least a few dozen minor X server issues discovered by Coverity, but that's getting dangerously close to Nokia work over the holidays. The majority of the issues are error paths anyway, nothing really critical.

In the more being lazy and doing nothing area, Avatar looks like it could be an interesting movie...

Static analysis For The Win!

I caught on about clang, which is both a compiler and static analyzer, after it was mentioned on the xorg-devel list. Since then I've been running it on my own code and gradually fixing up errors.

Now, usually such tools are less than impressive (excluding extremely expensive proprietary tools such as Coverity.) However, clang has been really useful in eliminating a lot of dead code, unused variables (and the overhead of calling expensive functions to calculate those variables.)

I even discovered one major bug in the expression evaluator in my game engine which had gone overlooked for some time, which would result in two opcodes giving incorrect results and ultimately effecting the rendering of the shaders.

Clang is currently lacking Inter-Procedural Analysis but it seems like it's on the to-do shortlist, which will be a very nice feature. Hopefully it won't be long before Coverity's eating it's heart out.