Plurrrr

Mon 24 May 2021

Discovering goroutine leaks with Semgrep

While learning how to write multithreaded code in Java or C++ can make computer science students reconsider their career choices, calling a function asynchronously in Go is just a matter of prefixing a function call with the go keyword. However, writing concurrent Go code can also be risky, as vicious concurrency bugs can slowly sneak into your application. Before you know it, there could be thousands of hanging goroutines slowing down your application, ultimately causing it to crash. This blog post provides a Semgrep rule that can be used in a bug-hunting quest and includes a link to a repository of specialized Semgrep rules that we use in our audits. It also explains how to use one of those rules to find a particularly pesky type of bug in Go: goroutine leaks.

Source: Discovering goroutine leaks with Semgrep, an article by Alex Useche.

Parsing in JavaScript: Tools and Libraries

If you need to parse a language, or document, from JavaScript there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem:

  • use an existing library supporting that specific language: for example a library to parse XML
  • building your own custom parser by hand
  • a tool or library to generate a parser: for example ANTLR, that you can use to build parsers for any language

Source: Parsing in JavaScript: all the tools and libraries you can use, an article by Gabriele Tomassetti.