Every developer knows about a debugger, version control system or, for example, unit-tests. Nevertheless, not all developers are familiar with the methodology of static code analysis. Meanwhile, the technology becomes an integral part of the development cycle of programs. I would like to suggest a small introductory course for anyone interested in modern development trends.
PVS-Studio is a static code analyzer that detects errors and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of programs written in C/C++/C#. Version 6.16 has obtained 11 new general analysis diagnostics.
To measure the efficiency of our analyzer, and also to promote the methodology of static analysis, we regularly analyze open source projects for bugs and write articles about the results. 2016 was no exception. This year is especially important as it is the year of the “growth” of the C# analyzer. PVS-Studio has obtained a large number of new C# diagnostics, an improved virtual values mechanism (symbolic execution) and much more. Based on the results of our teamwork, I compiled a kind of chart of the most interesting bugs, found in various C# projects in 2016.
IT conferences and meetings on programming languages see a growing number of speakers talking about static code analysis. Although this field is quite specific, there is still a number of interesting discussions to be found here to help programmers understand the methods, ways of use, and specifics of static code analysis. In this article, we have collected a number of videos on static analysis whose easy style of presentation makes them useful and interesting to a wide audience of both skilled and novice programmers.
Author: Matt Might
Static analyzers allow programmers to bound and predict the behavior of software without running it. Once used exclusively for program optimization, they have rapidly risen in prominence for areas like software security and automatic parallelization. The author takes you on a tour of the landscape of static analysis through the lens of abstract interpretation.
A logical error
Continue reading
The Microsoft Corporation has recently published, for free, access the source code of the CoreCLR engine, which is a key component of .NET Core. We couldn’t help but pay attention to this event. The wider a project’s audience is, the worse defects found in the code will seem, won’t they? Despite Microsoft themselves being the authors of the product, there are still some issues to examine and think over in their code – just like in any other large project.
Once more I got reassured that programmers write programs absolutely carelessly, so that their programs work not because of their skill but due to chance and care of Microsoft or Intel compiler developers. Right, it is them who really care and put crutches under our lop-sided programs when necessary.
Here is a byte-breaking story of the CString class and daughter of it, the Format function.
