[Wiltshire] Static analysis tools

[David Fletcher]

On Monday 13 July 2009 15:18:02 John Larkworthy wrote:
> Dave,
>
> GCC does a pretty good static check particularly if you use the -Wall
> option. It will report on apparent use of uniitialised variables which may
> not be your problem. Things like stack overflow or reading beyond array
> bounds are usually trapped using dynamic checkers such as valgrind. This
> would probably mean you need a test harness to drive the code through all
> paths to reveal the nasty little bug.
>
> Actually writing a harness and excuting under gdb/ddd will probably allow
> you to single step through the code and discover the logical error.
>
> John.
>

Yes, I've done some work on one application, porting it to Linux. 
Unfortunately there's no suitable PC/104 processor card around here to run it 
on the hardware, and I'll also need to do some more work to shift some of it 
into a kernel module. But, yes I did end up fixing hundreds of errors and 
warnings, and I now have a single set of source code that compiles with 
either gcc or the old Borland compiler.

I don't really want to start going through the same exercise again until I see 
my first effort working.

I'll be at the pub later, maybe there will be some time to chat more about it 
then.

Dave