3 ms·
this may be a silly question, but should these kind of problems be solvable with linting?
by ericlewis 8y ago
this may be a silly question, but should these kind of problems be solvable with linting?
- pjmlp 8y agoLint was developed alongside C. It is available since 1979, yet many still keep avoiding static analysis tooling. In any case, static analysis only works over the available source, it does nothing for binary dependencies.
- dwheeler 8y agoShort answer: No. The original "lint" was developed many decades ago. The problem is that C just doesn't provide enough type information to really do this properly. For example, there's no difference between "pointer to one stand-alone object", "pointer to beginning of an array (and here is its size)", and "pointer to an object within an array (and here is its size)". For many academics this is a "solved" problem - just use almost any language except C, C++, Forth, and assembly. There were solutions to these problems before C was created. Of course, out here in the real world there are large existing C programs that no one is going to convert, and there are reasons people write new C code today.