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Code Analyzer Turned Out to be Smarter Than One of its Creators

posted by martyb on Monday October 23 2017, @06:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the MY-code-is-perfect! dept.

Andrey_Karpov writes:

I am really astonished by the capabilities of static code analysis. The tool surprised me the other day as it turned out to be smarter and more attentive than I am. I found I must be careful when working with static analysis tools. Code reported by the analyzer often looks fine and I'm tempted to discard the warning as a false positive and move on. I fell into this trap and failed to spot bugs...Even I, one of the PVS-Studio developers.

So, appreciate and use static code analyzers! They will help save your time and nerve cells.

[Ed note: I debated running this story as there was an element of self-promotion (aka Bin Spam), but the submitter has been with the site for a while and has posted informative comments. Besides, I know there have been far too many times when I've seen a compiler complain about some section of my code and I'm thinking there is nothing wrong with it — and then I, finally, see my mistake. Anyone have samples of code where you just knew the compiler or static analyzer was wrong, only to find out otherwise? --martyb]

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @08:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @08:47AM (#586236)

    The second bug it found was caused by the following definition in a header file:

    #define sprintf std::printf

    I hope they immediately fired the programmer who wrote that atrocity (no, I don't mean the obvious typo; even after correcting that, it's just wrong in so many ways).

    Well, at least he included the std namespace, instead of adding "using namespace std".

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