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
- 220 LFX Mentorship
- 220 LFX Mentorship: Linux Kernel
- 805 Linux Foundation IT Professional Programs
- 360 Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 182 Advanced Cloud Engineer IT Professional Program
- 82 DevOps Engineer IT Professional Program
- 150 Cloud Native Developer IT Professional Program
- 138 Express Training Courses
- 138 Express Courses - Discussion Forum
- 6.3K Training Courses
- 48 LFC110 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 71 LFC131 Class Forum
- 43 LFD102 Class Forum
- 228 LFD103 Class Forum
- 19 LFD110 Class Forum
- 41 LFD121 Class Forum
- 18 LFD133 Class Forum
- 8 LFD134 Class Forum
- 18 LFD137 Class Forum
- 71 LFD201 Class Forum
- 5 LFD210 Class Forum
- 5 LFD210-CN Class Forum
- 2 LFD213 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 128 LFD232 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 2 LFD233 Class Forum
- 4 LFD237 Class Forum
- 24 LFD254 Class Forum
- 699 LFD259 Class Forum
- 111 LFD272 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 4 LFD272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 12 LFD273 Class Forum
- 168 LFS101 Class Forum
- 1 LFS111 Class Forum
- 3 LFS112 Class Forum
- 3 LFS116 Class Forum
- 7 LFS118 Class Forum
- LFS120 Class Forum
- 9 LFS142 Class Forum
- 8 LFS144 Class Forum
- 4 LFS145 Class Forum
- 3 LFS146 Class Forum
- 2 LFS148 Class Forum
- 14 LFS151 Class Forum
- 4 LFS157 Class Forum
- 40 LFS158 Class Forum
- 10 LFS162 Class Forum
- 2 LFS166 Class Forum
- 4 LFS167 Class Forum
- 3 LFS170 Class Forum
- 2 LFS171 Class Forum
- 3 LFS178 Class Forum
- 3 LFS180 Class Forum
- 2 LFS182 Class Forum
- 5 LFS183 Class Forum
- 32 LFS200 Class Forum
- 737 LFS201 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 3 LFS201-JP クラス フォーラム - Discontinued
- 19 LFS203 Class Forum
- 135 LFS207 Class Forum
- 2 LFS207-DE-Klassenforum
- 1 LFS207-JP クラス フォーラム
- 302 LFS211 Class Forum
- 56 LFS216 Class Forum
- 52 LFS241 Class Forum
- 48 LFS242 Class Forum
- 38 LFS243 Class Forum
- 15 LFS244 Class Forum
- 4 LFS245 Class Forum
- LFS246 Class Forum
- LFS248 Class Forum
- 52 LFS250 Class Forum
- 2 LFS250-JP クラス フォーラム
- 1 LFS251 Class Forum
- 155 LFS253 Class Forum
- 1 LFS254 Class Forum
- 1 LFS255 Class Forum
- 9 LFS256 Class Forum
- 1 LFS257 Class Forum
- 1.3K LFS258 Class Forum
- 10 LFS258-JP クラス フォーラム
- 122 LFS260 Class Forum
- 160 LFS261 Class Forum
- 43 LFS262 Class Forum
- 82 LFS263 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 15 LFS264 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 11 LFS266 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 24 LFS267 Class Forum
- 25 LFS268 Class Forum
- 31 LFS269 Class Forum
- 5 LFS270 Class Forum
- 202 LFS272 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 2 LFS272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 3 LFS147 Class Forum
- 1 LFS274 Class Forum
- 4 LFS281 Class Forum
- 10 LFW111 Class Forum
- 261 LFW211 Class Forum
- 183 LFW212 Class Forum
- 15 SKF100 Class Forum
- 1 SKF200 Class Forum
- 1 SKF201 Class Forum
- 797 Hardware
- 199 Drivers
- 68 I/O Devices
- 37 Monitors
- 104 Multimedia
- 174 Networking
- 91 Printers & Scanners
- 85 Storage
- 758 Linux Distributions
- 82 Debian
- 67 Fedora
- 17 Linux Mint
- 13 Mageia
- 23 openSUSE
- 148 Red Hat Enterprise
- 31 Slackware
- 13 SUSE Enterprise
- 353 Ubuntu
- 468 Linux System Administration
- 39 Cloud Computing
- 71 Command Line/Scripting
- Github systems admin projects
- 93 Linux Security
- 78 Network Management
- 102 System Management
- 47 Web Management
- 64 Mobile Computing
- 18 Android
- 34 Development
- 1.2K New to Linux
- 1K Getting Started with Linux
- 373 Off Topic
- 115 Introductions
- 174 Small Talk
- 23 Study Material
- 806 Programming and Development
- 304 Kernel Development
- 484 Software Development
- 1.8K Software
- 263 Applications
- 183 Command Line
- 3 Compiling/Installing
- 987 Games
- 317 Installation
- 98 All In Program
- 98 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)