C++ *

Recently PVS-Studio has implemented a major feature—we supported intermodular analysis of C++ projects. This article covers our and other tools' implementations. You'll also find out how to try this feature and what we managed to detect using it.

The PVS-Studio analyzer already has plugins for such IDEs from JetBrains as Rider, IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio. Somehow we missed another IDE - CLion. The time has come to make amends! But why would you need PVS-Studio if CLion already has the code analyzer? What problems appeared during development? Keep reading to find answers to these questions.

Couple of weeks ago (or to be more precise, on July 2, 2021), the legendary BitTorrent protocol turned twenty years old. Created by Bram Cohen, the protocol has been developing rapidly since its inception, and has quickly become one of the most popular ways to exchange files. So why not check out a couple of long-lived related projects with the PVS-Studio analyzer for Linux?

Static analyzers' primary aim is to search for errors missed by developers. Recently, the PVS-Studio team again found an interesting example proving the power of static analysis.

PVS-Studio is a static analysis tool that helps find errors in software source code. This time PVS-Studio looked for bugs in Storm Engine's source code.

From the earliest days, we used MSVC to compile the PVS-Studio C++ analyzer for Windows - then, in 2006, known as Viva64, version 1.00. With new releases, the analyzer's C++ core learned to work on Linux and macOS, and we modified the project's structure to support CMake. However, we kept using the MSVC compiler to build the analyzer's version for Windows. Then, in 2019, on April 29th, Visual Studio developers announced they had included the LLVM utilities and Clang compiler in the IDE. And just recently we've gotten around to try it.

A graph is a kind of data structure that includes a set of vertices and edges. Graph traversing means a visit to each vertex of the graph precisely. The graph traversing is used to determine the order in which vertices are being visited throughout the search process. A graph traversing searches for the edges that will be used in the search operation without establishing loops. This means that using graph traversal, we will go to all the vertices of the graph without going into a looping path.

There are two kinds of graph traversal methods.

Stack

Stack is a linear data structure. In stack, data access is limited. It follows the rule of insertion and deletion of data. Stack is a collection of only similar data types. Elements in the stack are arranged sequentially. It follows the LIFO principle which is the last-in and first-out rule.

Example

To understand this concept, let us take an example of arranging coins. If we start placing coins one after the other in such a way that the first coin will be placed first at the bottom and the next coin will come on above the first coin and so on. Now if we want to remove coins, then the topmost coin which is the third coin will be removed first. So in this way, the last coin will be removed first according to the LIFO principle.

"How much longer are you going to build it?" - a phrase that every developer has uttered at least once in the middle of the night. Yes, a build can be long and there is no escaping it. One does not simply redistribute the whole thing among 100+ cores, instead of some pathetic 8-12 ones. Or is it possible?

Somehow, it so happens that we write about our diagnostics, but barely touch upon the subject of how we enhance the analyzer's internal mechanics. So, for a change, today we'll talk about a new useful upgrade for our data flow analysis.

At the very beginning of this year, Apple released the source code for macOS – Big Sur. It includes XNU, the kernel of the macOS operating system. A few years ago, PVS-Studio has already checked the kernel source code. It coincided with the analyzer release on macOS. It's been a while since then. The new kernel source code has been released. A second check? Why not?

Most influential programmers say that code must be self-documenting. They find comments useful only when working with something uncommon. Our team shares this opinion. Recently we came across a code snippet that perfectly proves it.

Users sometimes ask how new diagnostics appear in the PVS-Studio static analyzer. We answer that we draw inspiration from a variety of sources: books, coding standards, our own mistakes, our users' emails, and others. Recently we came up with an interesting idea of a new diagnostic. Today we decided to tell the story of how it happened.

Having only programming background, it is impossible to develop software in some areas. Take the difficulties of medical software development as an example. The same is with music software, which will be discussed in this article. Here you need an advice of subject matter experts. However, it's more expensive for software development. That is why developers sometimes save on code quality. The example of the MuseScore project check, described in the article, will show the importance of code quality expertise. Hopefully, programming and musical humor will brighten up the technical text.

In our articles, we regularly repeat an important idea: a static analyzer should be used regularly. This helps detect and cheaply fix many errors at the earliest stage. It looks nice in theory. As we know, actions still speak louder than words. Let's look at some recent bugs in new code of the Blender project.

Recently we found out that the new version of the fheroes2 project was released. In our company there are many fans of Heroes of Might and Magic game series. So, we couldn't pass it up and checked the project by PVS-Studio.

rotor is a non-intrusive event loop friendly C++ actor micro framework with hierarchical supervising, similar to its elder brothers like caf and sobjectizer. There is a bulk of important changes since the last release announcement v0.09

As Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is being refreshed using new C++ standard, deprecating tbb::task interface, the need for high-level tasking interface becomes more obvious. In this article, I’m proposing yet another way of defining what a high-level parallel task programming model can look like in modern C++. I created it in 2014 and it was my last contribution to TBB project as its core developer after 9 wonderful years of working there. However, this proposal has not been used in production yet, so a new discussion might help it to be adopted.

An essential part of any modern static code analyzer is data flow analysis. However, from an outside perspective, the use of data flow analysis and its benefit is unclear. Some people still consider static analysis a tool searching for something in code according to a certain pattern. Thus, we occasionally write blog posts to show how this or that technology, used in the PVS-Studio analyzer, helps to identify another interesting error. Today, we have such an article about the bug found in the Base64, one of the encoding standard implementations of binary data.

The recent Qt 6 release compelled us to recheck the framework with PVS-Studio. In this article, we reviewed various interesting errors we found, for example, those related to processing dates. The errors we discovered prove that developers can greatly benefit from regularly checking their projects with tools like PVS-Studio.