Tag: pvs-studio

Entries for tag "pvs-studio", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 3.

Pages: 1

# Check of CommonLib using PVS-Studio

Mon
13
Nov 2017

Courtesy developers of PVS-Studio, I could use this static code analysis tool to check my home projects. I blogged about the tool recently. It's powerful and especially good at finding issues with 32/64-bit portability. Now I analyzed CommonLib - a library I develop and use for many years, which contains various facilities for C++ programming. That allowed me to find and fix many bugs. Here are the most interesting ones I've met:

Comments | #commonlib #c++ #pvs-studio Share

# New Version of PVS-Studio

Thu
09
Nov 2017

PVS-Studio is a great, commercial static code analyzer. I blogged about it few years ago. Now the latest version is much more powerful. It supports C, C++, and C#, works on Windows and Linux, as a standalone app, as well as plugin for Visual Studio (including latest version 2017).

PVS-Studio is particularly good at finding issues with code portability between 32-bit and 64-bit. Out of my personal projects, I already ported CommonLib to 64 bits, and RegScript2 is written to support 64 bits from the start, but porting my main app (music visualization program) to 64 bits is a large task that I still have on my TODO list. Even if I know how to write portable code (use size_t not int etc. :) I made first commits to this repository 8 years ago, when my programming knowledge was much smaller, so I'm sure there are many nasty bugs there. Making it working as 64-bit app will be a difficult task and I'm sure PVS-Studio will help me with that. I will share my experiences and conclusions when I eventually do it.

In the meantime, I recommend to check their Blog, where developers of this tool share many valuable information. They also maintain list of articles describing errors they found in open source projects.

Comments | #tools #c++ #pvs-studio #visual studio Share

# Static C++ Code Analysis with PVS-Studio

Sat
12
Mar 2011

By the courtesy of its authors, I have a chance to evaluate PVS-Studio - a static code analyzer for C, C++ and C++0x. This commercial application is installed as a plugin in Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010. Fortunately I have Visual Studio 2008 Professional at home so I could try it with the code of my personal projects. PVS-Studio differs from other tools of this kind, like free Cppcheck, by finding three types of errors or warnings: general, related to OpenMP and 64-bit portability issues.

After opening my solution in Visual Studio, I choose a command from the special menu to analyze all the code.

A progressbar appears while PVS-Studio does the computations, utilizing almost 100% of all 4 CPU cores. Finally, a dockable panel appears with a list of found issues.

The general category warns about exact float comparison with == and stuff like that. It managed to find few places where I forgot the "&" character while passing a vector as const refefence parameter, rightly telling that it will cause "decreased performance". But its greatest find in my CommonLib library code was this unbelievable bug:

Some messages look funny. Should I code some general, abstract, portable, object-oriented, Alexandrescu-style template-based solution here just to avoid copying some code into several similar instructions? :)

I didn't check how the OpenMP validation works because I don't currently use this extension. As for 64-bit compatibility issues, I have lots of them - just because my code is not prepared to be compiled as 64-bit. PVS-Studio seem to do a good job pointing to places where fixed-length 32-bit integers are mixed with pointers, array indexing etc.

Overall, PVS-Studio looks like a good tool for C++ programmers who care about the quality of their code. Finding issues related to OpenMP and 64-bit compatibility can be something of a great value, if only you need such features.

Too bad that PVS-Studio, opposite to Cppcheck, is a Visual Studio plugin, not a standalone application, so it obviously requires you to have a commercial MSVS version and do not work with Express edition. But this is understandable - if you need OpenMP or 64-bit, you probably already use Visual Studio Professional or higher.

PVS-Studio analyzes C, C++ and C++0x. It doesn't work with C++/CLI language, but that's not a big flaw too. I use C++/CLI at work, but I can see it's quite unpopular, niche language. Its compilation or analysis would also be very difficult because it mixes all features from both native C++ and .NET. Even Microsoft didn't find resources to implement IntelliSense for C++/CLI in Visual Studio 2010.

Comments | #tools #c++ #software engineering #visual studio #pvs-studio Share

Pages: 1