CONTENTS

• NAME
• DESCRIPTION
• COMMON PROBLEMS
  • Perl environment problems
  • C99
  • Symbol Names and Namespace Pollution
    • Choosing legal symbol names
    • Choosing good symbol names
  • Writing safer macros
  • Portability problems
  • Problematic System Interfaces
  • Security problems
• DEBUGGING
  • Poking at Perl
  • Using a source-level debugger
  • gdb macro support
  • Dumping Perl Data Structures
  • Using gdb to look at specific parts of a program
  • Using gdb to look at what the parser/lexer are doing
• SOURCE CODE STATIC ANALYSIS
  • lint
  • Coverity
  • HP-UX cadvise (Code Advisor)
  • cpd (cut-and-paste detector)
  • gcc warnings
  • Warnings of other C compilers
• MEMORY DEBUGGERS
  • valgrind
  • AddressSanitizer
  • Dr Memory
• PROFILING
  • Gprof Profiling
  • GCC gcov Profiling
  • callgrind profiling
  • profiler profiling (Cygwin)
  • Visual Studio Profiling
• MISCELLANEOUS TRICKS
  • PERL_DESTRUCT_LEVEL
  • Leaked SV spotting: sv_mark_arenas() and sv_sweep_arenas()
  • PERL_MEM_LOG
  • DDD over gdb
  • C backtrace
  • Poison
  • Read-only optrees
  • When is a bool not a bool?
  • Finding unsafe truncations
  • The .i Targets
• AUTHOR

#NAME

perlhacktips - Tips for Perl core C code hacking

#DESCRIPTION

This document will help you learn the best way to go about hacking on the Perl core C code. It covers common problems, debugging, profiling, and more.

If you haven't read perlhack and perlhacktut yet, you might want to do that first.

#