Throughout Python's 20-plus year history, its quality has been in the hands of the volunteers around the world openly contributing to it. Thanks to Coverity, those volunteers have been pointed to many quality and security issues via Coverity Scan, a service which finds defects in C/C++ and Java projects at no cost.
As the CPython project includes over 370,000 lines of C code*, accounting for 42% of the codebase, a lot of it lies outside of the analysis tools our community has created to work with Python code. Since 2006, Coverity's scans of that code have found nearly 1,000 defects, 860 of which our contributors have fixed.
In an industry where the standard defect density is a rate of 1 per 1,000 lines of code, CPython has attained a rate of 0.005 defects per 1,000 lines, and "introduces a new level of quality for open source software," said Coverity.
“Python is the model citizen of good code quality practices, and we applaud their contributors and maintainers for their commitment to quality,” said Jennifer Johnson, chief marketing officer for Coverity.
The PSF and the rest of the community join Coverity in applauding all of those who have contributed their time and effort to make CPython a better project, along with the countless others who contribute to a powerful landscape of Python interpreters.
For more information, read Coverity's "Coverity Finds Python Sets New Level of Quality for Open Source Software" press release.
* generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount'.
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