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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]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday October 23 2017, @09:46PM (2 children)
So, you were trying to use Borland C++ in the early 1990s? Couldn't you tell that was a mistake? I remember evaluating it in 1991 and coming to the conclusion that it was unsuitable for any applications more complex than: "Hello world, how are you?". We spent the next several years developing our apps in straight C, didn't revisit C++ until Windows 95 came out (in 1996.)
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(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 23 2017, @11:06PM (1 child)
Why, no, I couldn't tell right away. The school I graduated from had a very poor CS program. In 1990, they were still stuck on Pascal, and Turbo Pascal (from Borland, of course) was their compiler of choice. All this was on PCs running MS DOS, and Windows 3 was pretty much a useless curiosity, more for lusers in business school who couldn't handle the command line and insisted on bogging their computers down with GUI versions of office apps. They didn't teach or use C, let alone C++. I had to learn C on my own. And since Turbo Pascal seemed to be an excellent compiler and environment, why should I think that excellence would not extend to their C/C++ compilers? The only exposure to C was a class on OSes that used Minix, as Linux didn't yet exist at that time. The professor didn't spend any time teaching C, seemed to expect everyone to be able to dive right into the Minix source code.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:59AM
I guess I got lucky, I tried to do a few simple things in C++ and it became clear within less than a week that the compiler wasn't doing what the book said it should.
Your school experience sounds typical late 80s - in my Computer Engineering program, we had a Pascal class, then later we had a Compilers class where we were supposed to write a full assembler using C language, but no C language class as a pre-requisite. Further, the project was supposed to be done on a mainframe that was always down, so I did it in Turbo C on IBM PCs in various other labs and at a friend's house, thinking I would port it to the mainframe when it started working - which it never did. The prof tried to give me a ration of (*#% "porting is not a trivial exercise, the assignment was to do it on the mainframe" - to which I responded "did a single student successfully code anything on that mainframe? It was only working for about 4 hours this semester, total."
We spent the early 90s coding in C on DOS with PharLap 32 bit extender, using the Menuet GUI library - which we eventually purchased the source code to and ported it to compile in the PharLap environment also. Finally around the fall of '96 we started porting the C project into C++, running Borland's API - whatever they called it. Around 2000, someone bought the code and the first thing they did was hire a team to port it to Visual Studio, cost them about a quarter million to do the port - but the investors were happier that way since they could hire Visual Studio programmers more readily.
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