Development

During the summer of 2019, Huawei gave a series of presentations announcing the Ark Compiler technology. The company claims that this open-source project will help developers make the Android system and third-party software much more fluent and responsive. By tradition, every new promising open-source project goes through PVS-Studio for us to evaluate the quality of its code.

Introduction

The Ark Compiler was first announced by Huawei at the launch of the new smartphone models P30 and P30 Pro. It is claimed that the Ark Compiler will improve the fluency of the Android system by 24% and response speed by 44%. Third-party Android applications will also gain a 60% speed-up after recompilation with the Ark Compiler. The open-source version of the project is called OpenArkCompiler; its source code is available on Gitee, a Chinese fork of GitHub.

Nowadays everyone knows about cloud services. Many companies have cracked this market segment and created their own cloud services of various purposes. Recently our team has also been interested in these services in terms of integrating the PVS-Studio code analyzer into them. Chances are, our regular readers have already guessed what type of project we will check this time. The choice fell on the code of Huawei cloud services.

Anyone who programs microcontrollers probably knows about FreeRTOS, or at least heard of this operating system. Amazon developers decided to enhance the abilities of this operating system to work with AWS Internet of Things services. This is how Amazon FreeRTOS appeared. We, developers of the PVS-Studio static code analyzer, were asked by mail and in comments to check these projects. Well, now get what you asked for. Keep reading to find out what came out of it.

In Mail.ru Group, we have Tarantool, a Lua-based application server and a database united. It's fast and classy, but the resources of a single server are always limited. Vertical scaling is also not the panacea. That is why Tarantool has some tools for horizontal scaling, or the vshard module [1]. It allows you to spread data across multiple servers, but you'll have to tinker with it for a while to configure it and bolt on the business logic.

Good news: we got our share of bumps (for example, [2], [3]) and created another framework, which significantly simplifies the solution to this problem.

Тarantool Cartridge is the new framework for developing complex distributed systems. It allows you to concentrate on writing business logic instead of solving infrastructure problems. Under the cut, I will tell you how this framework works and how it could help in writing distributed services.

Hello, everyone. Today we have another Microsoft project on the check. By the title of this article, you can guess that this time developers didn't «please» us with a large number of errors. We hope the project's authors won't be offended by the title. After all, a small number of errors is great, isn't it? However, we still managed to find something intriguing in the Azure PowerShell code. We suggest getting to know the features of this project and checking out errors, found using the PVS-Studio C# analyzer.

Static analysis methodology involves various technologies. One of them is preprocessing files right before analyzing them. Preprocessed files are created by the compiler that runs in a special working mode. Unfortunately, our long-standing experience of developing a static analyzer shows that this mode is not great for testing. In this note, I'll give the example of a fresh bug in the C++ compiler from Microsoft.

Here we are, continuing to explore the code of calculators! Today we are going to take a look at the project called SpeedCrunch, the second most popular free calculator.

Introduction

SpeedCrunch is a high-precision scientific calculator featuring a fast, keyboard-driven user interface. It is free and open-source software, licensed under the GPL and running on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

The source code is available on BitBucket. I was somewhat disappointed by the build documentation, which could be more detailed. It says that you need «Qt 5.2 or later» to build the project, but it actually required a few specific packages, which wasn't easy to figure out from the CMake log. By the way, it is considered a good practice nowadays to include a Dockerfile into the project to make it easier for the user to set up the development environment.

The National Internet Segment Reliability Research explains how the outage of a single Autonomous System might affect the connectivity of the impacted region with the rest of the world. Most of the time, the most critical AS in the region is the dominant ISP on the market, but not always.

As the number of alternate routes between AS’s increases (and do not forget that the Internet stands for “interconnected network” — and each network is an AS), so does the fault-tolerance and stability of the Internet across the globe. Although some paths are from the beginning more important than others, establishing as many alternate routes as possible is the only viable way to ensure an adequately robust network.

The global connectivity of any given AS, regardless of whether it is an international giant or regional player, depends on the quantity and quality of its path to Tier-1 ISPs.

Usually, Tier-1 implies an international company offering global IP transit service over connections with other Tier-1 providers. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that such connectivity will be maintained all the time. For many ISPs at all “tiers”, losing connection to just one Tier-1 peer would likely render them unreachable from some parts of the world.

This is a second article, which focuses on usage of the PVS-Studio analyzer in cloud CI-systems. This time we'll consider the platform Azure DevOps — a cloud CI\CD solution from Microsoft. We'll be analyzing the ShareX project.

This article focuses on the specifics of checking Unreal Engine projects with the PVS-Studio static analyser on the Windows operating system: how to install the analyser, check a project, where and how to view an error report.

Over the years, the PVS-Studio team has been developing the same-name static analyzer. At this point the analyzer represents a complex software solution, which provides the analysis of such programming languages, as C, C++, C# and Java on Windows, Linux and macOS platforms. Just recently the Java language joined the ranks of supported languages. The PVS-Studio analyzer has proved itself as a reliable tool among C++ and C# developers in quite some time, whereas for Java audience PVS-Studio is still a newcomer. Many haven't even heard of the analyzer, and those who had, aren't quite familiar with all its abilities. So in this article, I'd like to introduce PVS-Studio Java to you, talk about the ways to start it and its abilities.

It's been two years since we last checked the code of the LLVM project with PVS-Studio, so let's see if PVS-Studio is still the leader among tools for detecting bugs and security weaknesses. We'll do that by scanning the LLVM 8.0.0 release for new bugs.

When React.js 16.8 was released we got the opportunity to use React Hooks. Hooks make us able to write fully-functional components using functions. We can use all React.js features and do in in more convenient way.

A lot of people don't agree with Hooks conception. In this article I'd like to tell about some important advantages React Hooks give you and why we need to write with Hooks.

I will not talk about how to use hooks. It is not very important for the examples. If you want to read something on this topic, you can use official documentation. Also, if this topic will be interesting for you, I will write more about Hooks.

Vue mixins are the recommended way of sharing common functionality between components. They are perfectly fine until you use more than one for them. That's because they are implicit by design and pollute your component's context. Let's try to fix this by giving them as much explicitness as we can.

A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces.

It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from other fields with that of an iOS developer who implements user interfaces. For example, when a designer is creating something that is big enough to be broken down into smaller parts, using a strategy like ‘Divide and Conquer’ is key to being able to focus on smaller parts that will be assembled at later stages in the process.

Breaking down a whole design into smaller subunits allows us to think about each problem in isolation, removing any dependencies between the components. But the full picture also needs to be present throughout the whole process, otherwise there can be problems when the time comes to fit everything back together.

On the other hand, while watching Abstract I noticed that in the design process for objects like a shoes, banners or buildings the final design remains fixed for the lifetime of the product. The design of a Nike shoe isn’t going to change after it is released and there aren’t going to be any updates once it’s on the shelf in the shop. Sometimes a design remains unchanged even 20 years later, and the product is still sound.

The Rust ecosystem is still growing. As a result, new libraries with improved functionality are frequently released into the developer community, while older libraries become obsolete. When we initially designed Exonum, we used the Iron web-framework. In this article, we describe how we ported the Exonum framework to actix-web using generic programming.

It is new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

Previous publications:

• December 2018

Software component developers tend to be far removed from the end users of the products in which their components are employed. Recently, however, we connected directly with a KOMPAS-3D MCAD user to solve an issue involving mold design. It seems that 3D models were being exported incorrectly to data exchange formats like STP, X_T, and SAT. The cause, unhappily for us, turned out to be in our С3D Modeler geometric modeling kernel. Here is how we solved the problem, quickly.

We interviewed Mark Pavluykovskiy — the creator of the Piper educational computer. We asked him about immigrating from Ukraine to the US, how he almost died in Africa, graduated from Princeton, dropped out of a doctorate in Oxford and created a product that deserved a praise from Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak.



In mid-October the Sistema_VC venture capital fund hosted a conference called Machine Teaching, where creators of various educational startups assembled to talk about technical advancements.

The special guest was Mark Pavluykosvkiy, the creator of Piper. His company created an educational computer — a children’s toy that, using wires, circuit boards and Minecraft teaches programming and engineering to children. A couple of years ago Mark completed a successful Kickstarter campaign, got a couple of Silicon Valley investors on board and raised around $11 million dollars in investments. Now he’s a member of Forbes’ “30 under 30” list, while his project is used by Satia Nadella and Steve Wozniak, among others.

Mark himself is a former Princeton and Oxford student. He was born in Ukraine, but moved to the US with his mother when he was a child. In various interviews Mark claimed that he doesn’t consider himself a genius, but simply someone who got very lucky. A lot of other people aren’t so lucky, however, and he considers it unfair. Driven by this notion, during his junior year he flew to Africa, where he almost died.

There are a lot of tips and tricks that allow iOS developers to know how to make performance optimizations to get animations in applications run smoothly. After reading the article you will realize what 16.67 milliseconds for iOS developer means, and which tools are better to use to track down the code.

The article is based on the keynote talk delivered by Luke Parham, currently an iOS engineer at Apple and an author of tutorials for iOS development on RayWenderlich.com, at the International Mobile Developers Conference MBLT DEV 2017.