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If you don't mind MS, their code analysis tools come in the express(free) version of VS 2012.
by stonemetal 14y ago
If you don't mind MS, their code analysis tools come in the express(free) version of VS 2012.
- pnathan 14y agoPersonally, I mind MS. But that's neither here nor there. My understanding is that their tools don't do "whole program analysis". Is that incorrect (I'd love to hear that I am!)?
- stonemetal 14y agoI can't say I know enough about it to say either way, in the article Carmack says: Technically, the Microsoft tool only performs local analysis, so it should be inferior to Coverity’s global analysis, but enabling it poured out mountains of errors, far more than Coverity reported. True, there were lots of false positives, but there was also a lot of scary, scary stuff.
- eru 14y agoAccording to a very insightful, but perhaps now slightly old article (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of-code-later/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lin...) Coverity tries--for political reasons--very hard to keep false positives down, very much at the expense of false negatives.
- pnathan 14y agoHaving seen Coverity's results, I would agree with that article. Particularly cogent are the social problems and how they play out.
- YokoZar 14y agoI'm pretty sure Coverity has multiple "tiers" of analysis, with the initial tier being the subset they're most certain of. Once you fix most of the obvious, almost-no-false-positive type stuff, then they're ready to show you the next tier.