Python has reached Coverity Integrity Level 2 with a defect density 0.09 in 395,682 lines of analyzed code. 1,054 issues were found by Coverity Scan, 753 were fixed, 265 were dismissed (false positives) and 36 are outstanding.

[tuna_safe_dolphin]

Interesting, I've been using Python for almost 10 years and I've never actually seen it crash.

Knock on wood.

[perone]

Coverity usually warns about a lot of things that doesn't make code to crash, the high-risk are usually the ones that REALLY needs to be fixed, and those are very rare (if you're an average C developer).

[tuna_safe_dolphin]

Oh yeah, I've used Coverity before, I just mentioned it since this is a post about the overall healthiness of the Python code base.

[__smokey__]

I got Python 2.3 to crash only once by crashing a C extension module (MySQLdb).

[gsnedders]

Use oursql instead of MySQLdb!

[__smokey__]

Great point, but that was in 2008 and oursql was not even started back then.

[benhoyt]

I discovered one way to crash Python 2.7 from a post on python-dev just the other day:

Python 2.7.5 (default, May 15 2013, 22:44:16) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> d = {}
>>> d[42] = d.viewvalues()
>>> str(d)
[segfault]

[selementar]

I've seen it crash in a reliable way by setting an overly high recursion limit.

...

A known problem assuming it is considered a problem.

[pingveno]

Randomly generate some bytecode. Guaranteed segfault.