While the world is discussing the 89th Ceremony of Oscar award and charts of actors and costumes, we’ve decided to write a review article about the IT-sphere. The article is going to cover the most interesting bugs, made in open source projects in 2016. This year was remarkable for our tool, as PVS-Studio has become available on Linux OS. The errors we present are hopefully, already fixed, but every reader can see how serious are the errors made by developers.
Bugs in C/C++ projects
The First Bug on Mars
In 1971, the USSR delivered the first planetary rovers on skis to Mars, whose task was to puncture the surface with a rod (housing a dynamic penetrometer and a radiation densitometer) to see if Mars was solid or liquid dusty. The first probe crashed on November 27; the second soft-landed on December 2 but didn’t manage to get out of the “shell” of the lander, so that attempt didn’t count.
Fun and Bugs in Microsoft Word 1.1a
The Microsoft company made a present to all programmers eager to dig into some interesting stuff: they opened the source codes of MS-DOS v 1.1, v 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a. The MS-DOS operating system is written in an assembler, so the analyzer cannot be applied to it. But Word is written in C. Word 1.1a’s source codes are almost 25 years old, but we still managed to analyze it. There’s no practical use of it, of course. Just for fun.
One more tool is now free
Static code analyzers are tools that help programmers find bugs on the earliest stages of development.
We are happy to announce that now you can use PVS-Studio static code analyzer for free, for educational purposes, so that individual developers and enthusiastic teams could also fully use it. To find out how to use this tool for free – please read the following sections.
Bug Inside: A Tiny Chance of a Huge Error on Pentium
“An average spreadsheet user could encounter this subtle flaw once in every 27,000 years of use.”
— Intel
“I give a scenario in which FDIV bugs are encountered once every three milliseconds or so.”
— Vaughan Pratt (SUN logo designer and coauthor of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm)
Why Windows 8 drivers have so many bugs
We have checked the Windows 8 Driver Samples pack with our PVS-Studio analyzer and found various bugs in its samples. There is nothing horrible about it – bugs can be found everywhere, so the title of this article may sound a bit high-flown. But these particular errors may be really dangerous, as it is a usual practice for developers to use demo samples as a basis for their own projects or borrow code fragments from them.
“Why is there no artificial intelligence yet?” Or, analysis of CNTK tool kit from Microsoft Research.
Microsoft have given open access to the source code of a tool kit that is used in the company to speed up the development of artificial intelligence: Computational Network Toolkit is now available at Github. The developers had to create their own custom solution, because the existing tools did not work fast enough.
Let’s have a look at the analysis results of the source code of this project, as done by our static code analyzer.
