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O'Reilly and Software Improvement Group conducted a survey about secure coding: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-alarming-state-of-secure-coding-neglect
Much of it is as expected but I stumbled upon this tidbit:
"[Static analysis] was reported as being used by 25% of respondents. One-third of those who didn't use it said it was too expensive. The rest of the non-users were fairly evenly divided among other explanations: tools were not available for their technology, were too hard to use, had too many false positives, or were not usable in Agile development."
When developing I have almost always used compiler warnings (gcc/acc/icc/cxx/clang) and dedicated tools cppcheck/flexelint/coverity-scan/pvs-studio/clang-analyze so the above snippet depressed me because catching errors sooner rather than later makes them much cheaper to fix. Static analysis tools can require much configuration, can be expensive, and be time-consuming, and I guess that for some languages such tools don't even exist. The part about static analysis tools not fitting a development process struck me as downright odd.
What is your take on this? Why aren't you using static analysis (and if you do: which one and for what?)
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday May 10 2017, @06:02AM (7 children)
Whenever I set up a new C/C++ project, I tend to go through the latest info page for gcc/clang (or other compiler I'm unfortunate enough to have to use) and enable everyone unless I explicitly know I don't want it. And in most cases I still want that warning enabled globally, and only disable it temporarily within a compilation unit on an as-needed basis. The compiler is your best friend, listen to it! :)
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday May 10 2017, @09:18AM (4 children)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Informative) by mth on Wednesday May 10 2017, @10:22AM (2 children)
-Wextra does not enable every warning. The GCC man page reads:
Note that some warning flags are not implied by -Wall. Some of them warn about constructions that users generally do not consider questionable, but which occasionally you might wish to check for; others warn about constructions that are necessary or hard to avoid in some cases, and there is no simple way to modify the code to suppress the warning. Some of them are enabled by -Wextra but many of them must be enabled individually.
It does enable a useful set of warnings, in my opinion, so "-Wall -Wextra" is a good starting point for most projects.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday May 10 2017, @11:28AM (1 child)
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 10 2017, @05:05PM
That is clang only and enables all warnings and other things. In fact, it enables so much, that the original idea was that it was only really useful in the development of clang itself; that is, when they run clang against their test suite.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday May 10 2017, @12:23PM
Nope, it does not. It enables *some* extra warnings, but not all. See https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html [gnu.org] for details. Things like -Wundef, -Wshadow, -Wfloat-equal and -Wpointer-arith need to be explicitly enabled.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday May 10 2017, @12:17PM (1 child)
only disable it temporarily within a compilation unit on an as-needed basis
Or, if you don't mind using a more intrusive approach, stop the false-positives by putting #pragmas around the code where you really do want to do something funky. [stackoverflow.com]
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday May 11 2017, @04:02AM
That is precisely what I mean when I say "within a compilation unit" :)
(Otherwise I would have said "for a particular compilation unit")
Gcc sure took its sweet time to get push/pop support for warnings, but these days it's fully functional, thankfully.