Skip to main content

Need some constructive criticism on your code? Ask perlcritic.

perlcritic is "a static source code analysis engine", a CPAN module which can also be used as a command.

An example:
$ perlcritic -severity 3 src/AModule.pm

Subroutine does not end with "return" at line 24, column 1. See page 197 of PBP. (Severity: 4)

Return value of eval not tested. at line 32, column 5. You can't depend upon the value of $@/$EVAL_ERROR to tell whether an eval failed.. (Severity: 3)

As you can see you can get extremely useful information about the sanity of your code and how much it complies to good coding practices. There are 5 different severity levels (being 5 the "less critic").

Most Policy modules are based on Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices (PBP), but it's not limited to it.

I run perlcritic (using typically severity 3) automatically on all the source code files, every time I run the unit tests and/or build a package, in order to get as soon as possible a valuable feedback after code changes. Since the same build scripts are used by a CI tool, I'm tempted to make the build fail if policies at level 4 or 5 are violated (as I do whenever even a single unit test fails), but I'm still not sure.

Anyway I strongly recommend this tool to anyone writing perl code, even if they are just scripts with a few lines (which are very likely to grow in the future, as a law on the increase of code complexity in the time - which I can't recall now - says ;-) ).

Personally, even if I don't agree 100% on what PBP recommends, I'd rather follow it and have a documented approach than do what I prefer (maybe just because I'm used to it) without a specific, well-documented reason.

If you just want to have a quick look, upload some perl code here, and see what feedback you get.

A note on the term constructive criticism: I chose it in the title as a mere translation from something I could have written in Italian, but then reading its definition on Wikipedia I think I've learned something more. Here's a quote:
Constructive criticism, or constructive analysis, is a compassionate attitude towards the person qualified for criticism. [...] the word constructive is used so that something is created or visible outcome generated rather than the opposite.

Popular posts from this blog

Troubleshooting TURN

  WebRTC applications use the ICE negotiation to discovery the best way to communicate with a remote party. I t dynamically finds a pair of candidates (IP address, port and transport, also known as “transport address”) suitable for exchanging media and data. The most important aspect of this is “dynamically”: a local and a remote transport address are found based on the network conditions at the time of establishing a session. For example, a WebRTC client that normally uses a server reflexive transport address to communicate with an SFU. when running inside the home office, may use a relay transport address over TCP when running inside an office network which limits remote UDP targets. The same configuration (defined as “iceServers” when creating an RTCPeerConnection will work in both cases, producing different outcomes.

Extracting RTP streams from network captures

I needed an efficient way to programmatically extract RTP streams from a network capture. In addition I wanted to: save each stream into a separate pcap file. extract SRTP-negotiated keys if present and available in the trace, associating them to the related RTP (or SRTP if the negotiation succeeded) stream. Some caveats: In normal conditions the negotiation of SRTP sessions happens via a secure transport, typically SIP over TLS, so the exchanged crypto information may not be available from a simple network capture. There are ways to extract RTP streams using Wireshark or tcpdump; it’s not necessary to do it programmatically. All this said I wrote a small tool ( https://github.com/giavac/pcap_tool ) that parses a network capture and tries to interpret each packet as either RTP/SRTP or SIP, and does two main things: save each detected RTP/SRTP stream into a dedicated pcap file, which name contains the related SSRC. print a summary of the crypto information exchanged, if available. With ...

Testing SIP platforms and pjsip

There are various levels of testing, from unit to component, from integration to end-to-end, not to mention performance testing and fuzzing. When developing or maintaining Real Time Communications (RTC or VoIP) systems,  all these levels (with the exclusion maybe of unit testing) are made easier by applications explicitly designed for this, like sipp . sipp has a deep focus on performance testing, or using a simpler term, load testing. Some of its features allow to fine tune properties like call rate, call duration, simulate packet loss, ramp up traffic, etc. In practical terms though once you have the flexibility to generate SIP signalling to negotiate sessions and RTP streams, you can use sipp for functional testing too. sipp can act as an entity generating a call, or receiving a call, which makes it suitable to surround the system under test and simulate its interactions with the real world. What sipp does can be generalised: we want to be able to simulate the real world tha...