About the benefits of a static code analyzer for programs
A lot of programmers make errors when writing the code and regardless of the size of the project, no one is immune to inattentiveness or unawareness of some new features. Static code analyzers are of great help in these cases. There is quite a number of such tools, but today we'll inspect PVS-Studio.
PVS-Studio is a tool for bug detection in the source code of programs, written in C, C++ and C#. The analyzer is available for programmers who are used to working on Windows OS and on Linux, where it can be embedded into any development environment due to the output similar to the compiler one.
In order to improve the quality of the product and the diagnostics in it, which find bugs; the developers tirelessly check new open-source projects and post the results of the checks in their blog.
PVS-Studio team found for more than 10000 bugs in various projects, among which there are many well-known projects, for example: Unreal Engine, React OS, Unity 3D, CryEngine 5, Open JDK, Serious Engine, GCC, Mono and many more.
Some bugs were quite indsignificant and happily lived in the analyzer projects without anybody noticing them. While others were very serious, arising questions like "How on Earth can a programmer code like that???".
For example,
A bug in the GCC compiler:
static bool dw_val_equal_p (dw_val_node *a, dw_val_node *b) { .... case dw_val_class_vms_delta: return (!strcmp (a->v.val_vms_delta.lbl1, b->v.val_vms_delta.lbl1) && !strcmp (a->v.val_vms_delta.lbl1, b->v.val_vms_delta.lbl1)); .... }
PVS-Studio warning: V501 There are identical sub-expressions '!strcmp(a->v.val_vms_delta.lbl1, b->v.val_vms_delta.lbl1)' to the left and to the right of the '&&' operator. dwarf2out.c 1428
A bug in Mono project:
static bool AreEqual (VisualStyleElement value1, VisualStyleElement value2) { return value1.ClassName == value1.ClassName && // <= value1.Part == value2.Part && value1.State == value2.State; }
PVS-Studio warning: V3001 There are identical sub-expressions 'value1.ClassName' to the left and to the right of the '==' operator. ThemeVisualStyles.cs 2141
In both fragments, there were serious errors because of simple typos. As a result, in GCC a check of the string lbl1 is done twice, while the string lbl2 was forgotten at all. In Mono the name of the class is compared with itself.
PVS-Studio analyzer can easily cope with such problems. Moreover, previously it could be used only on Windows, but now the developers have released a new version of PVS-Studio for Linux.
The new version of PVS-Studio for GNU/Linux OS, in addition to the native version of the analyzer offers convenient variants of integration to the projects, using CMake and QMake and the display of the analysis results in the QtCreator and CLion IDE. The product is available as .deb, .rpm or .tgz packages. Soon the developers are planning to launch their own repositories for a convenient auto-updating of the tool.
The analyzer can be installed as Visual Studio plug-in and can do the analysis in the background of modified files after their compilation. PVS-Studio detects potential errors of three main groups: general analysis, optimizations and 64-bit issues. The diagnostic set of general analysis allows detecting logic errors, typos, code fragments, causing access violation, incorrect usage of algorithms from STL libraries and a lot more.
The best way to see the benefits from the use of the analyzer is to run it on your own project. You can download and try both versions of the product on their official site.
PVS-Studio - http://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio-download/
PVS-Studio for Linux - http://www.viva64.com/en/pvs-studio-download-linux/
Comments
-
This should not be a Forum topic - it should be a Blog
0
Categories
- All Categories
- 51 LFX Mentorship
- 104 LFX Mentorship: Linux Kernel
- 576 Linux Foundation IT Professional Programs
- 304 Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 125 Advanced Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 53 DevOps Engineer IT Professional Program
- 61 Cloud Native Developer IT Professional Program
- 5 Express Training Courses
- 5 Express Courses - Discussion Forum
- 2.1K Training Courses
- 19 LFC110 Class Forum
- 7 LFC131 Class Forum
- 27 LFD102 Class Forum
- 158 LFD103 Class Forum
- 21 LFD121 Class Forum
- 1 LFD137 Class Forum
- 61 LFD201 Class Forum
- 1 LFD210 Class Forum
- LFD210-CN Class Forum
- 1 LFD213 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 128 LFD232 Class Forum
- LFD237 Class Forum
- 23 LFD254 Class Forum
- 613 LFD259 Class Forum
- 105 LFD272 Class Forum
- 1 LFD272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 1 LFD273 Class Forum
- 2 LFS145 Class Forum
- 25 LFS200 Class Forum
- 739 LFS201 Class Forum
- 1 LFS201-JP クラス フォーラム
- 11 LFS203 Class Forum
- 77 LFS207 Class Forum
- 300 LFS211 Class Forum
- 54 LFS216 Class Forum
- 47 LFS241 Class Forum
- 41 LFS242 Class Forum
- 37 LFS243 Class Forum
- 11 LFS244 Class Forum
- 37 LFS250 Class Forum
- 1 LFS250-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS251 Class Forum
- 141 LFS253 Class Forum
- LFS254 Class Forum
- 1.1K LFS258 Class Forum
- 10 LFS258-JP クラス フォーラム
- 93 LFS260 Class Forum
- 132 LFS261 Class Forum
- 33 LFS262 Class Forum
- 80 LFS263 Class Forum
- 15 LFS264 Class Forum
- 11 LFS266 Class Forum
- 18 LFS267 Class Forum
- 18 LFS268 Class Forum
- 23 LFS269 Class Forum
- 203 LFS272 Class Forum
- 1 LFS272-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS274 Class Forum
- LFS281 Class Forum
- 236 LFW211 Class Forum
- 172 LFW212 Class Forum
- 7 SKF100 Class Forum
- SKF200 Class Forum
- 903 Hardware
- 219 Drivers
- 74 I/O Devices
- 44 Monitors
- 116 Multimedia
- 209 Networking
- 101 Printers & Scanners
- 85 Storage
- 763 Linux Distributions
- 88 Debian
- 66 Fedora
- 15 Linux Mint
- 13 Mageia
- 24 openSUSE
- 142 Red Hat Enterprise
- 33 Slackware
- 13 SUSE Enterprise
- 357 Ubuntu
- 479 Linux System Administration
- 41 Cloud Computing
- 70 Command Line/Scripting
- Github systems admin projects
- 95 Linux Security
- 78 Network Management
- 108 System Management
- 49 Web Management
- 68 Mobile Computing
- 23 Android
- 30 Development
- 1.2K New to Linux
- 1.1K Getting Started with Linux
- 538 Off Topic
- 131 Introductions
- 217 Small Talk
- 22 Study Material
- 826 Programming and Development
- 278 Kernel Development
- 514 Software Development
- 928 Software
- 260 Applications
- 184 Command Line
- 3 Compiling/Installing
- 76 Games
- 316 Installation
- 61 All In Program
- 61 All In Forum
Upcoming Training
-
August 20, 2018
Kubernetes Administration (LFS458)
-
August 20, 2018
Linux System Administration (LFS301)
-
August 27, 2018
Open Source Virtualization (LFS462)
-
August 27, 2018
Linux Kernel Debugging and Security (LFD440)