data-flow analysis

Upsetting Opinions about Static Analyzers

Static analysis tools have advanced far over the time they've been around. They no longer resemble the "linters" that were in active use 20 years ago. But some programmers still view them as extremely primitive tools. And that's very sad.

Upsetting Opinions about Static Analyzers

by Andrey Karpov

From the article:

Of course, any modern static analyzer tracks the changes of variables' values. If a variable doesn't change, a warning is issued. If it does, no warning is issued. To ensure that, analyzers rely on data stream analysis. And that's exactly how PVS-Studio works. Let's take a look at the following synthetic example.