Re: Fuzz testing with perl

[ELISHEVA]

I'm not sure what you mean by a fuzz testing module. There are certainly plenty of random number/input generator modules on CPAN.

However, I think a general purpose fuzz testing framework would be hard to develop for Perl applications. In the automated fuzz testing system I developed a few years back for a project (Java), I used reflection to discover parameters to constructors and methods and then generated random input to create objects or to pass to methods.

Perl doesn't have a mechanism for retrieving the number or type of parameters of methods. The closest you come are prototypes, but they aren't widely used and they don't really specify parameter types so much as the context that should be used to interpret each parameter. You can get all of the subroutine symbols for a package, but you can't even tell which ones expect a class/object as a first parameter and which are normal functions.

I suppose you could create such a system by slapping a layer of metadata and reflection on top of Perl (Moose anyone?), but then you aren't just programming Perl, you are effectively creating a new language.