PVS-Studio for JetBrains CLion: ad astra per aspera

by Evgeniy Ovsyannikov, Sergey Vasiliev

Here's an answer to the question that we are discussing - PVS-Studio and CLion collaboration will let us detect more errors at the writing code stage. CLion highlights the errors on the fly, but at the same time is limited in the analysis capabilities. PVS-Studio doesn't highlight errors immediately, but it can perform deeper analysis. Note that PVS-Studio has an incremental analysis – the mode that checks only the changed files.

Intermodular analysis of C++ projects in PVS-Studio

by Oleg Lisiy, Sergey Larin

We can't apply the approach above to the PVS-Studio tool. Our analyzer's main difference from compilers is that it doesn't form intermediate representation that is abstracted from the language context. Therefore, to read a symbol from another module, the tool has to translate it again and represent a program as in-memory data structures (parse tree, control flow graph, etc). Data flow analysis may also require parsing the entire dependency graph by symbols in different modules. Such a task may take a long time. So, we collect information about symbols (in particular in data flow analysis) using semantic analysis. We need to somehow save this data separately beforehand. Such information is a set of facts for a particular symbol. We developed the below approach based on this idea.

Integrating PVS-Studio into uVision Keil

by Amomum

Keil provides a weird feature – creating a project batch file. I still don't know the purpose of this feature. This batch file contains all the necessary information for PVS-Studio, and it's enabled with a single check mark! Unfortunately, this check mark also breaks the incremental build. That is, any compilation becomes a complete recompilation. It affects the build time, so, unfortunately, it's not an option for us.

Beta-Testing of PVS-Studio Plugin for JetBrains CLion

by Evgeniy Ovsyannikov, Paul Eremeev

We usually recommend running full analysis regularly, such as once a day, at night. In addition to nightly analysis, we highly recommend checking new code immediately after writing it. This way you'll get the best advantage of using the analyzer. To do this, use incremental analysis, which works as follows. A project was changed, a developer runs a build. After successful compilation only modified files will be analyzed. Modified files are the ones that have been changed since the previous analysis.

PVS-Studio Team: Switching to Clang Improved PVS-Studio C++ Analyzer's Performance

by Alexey Govorov and Sergey Larin

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.

PVS-Studio 7.13

by Andrey Karpov

• The C++ analyzer provides enhanced support of Ninja projects on Windows using JSON Compilation Database (compile_commands.json).
• The C++ PVS-Studio analyzer spends 10% less time checking source files with the use of the Clang compiler.
• To check C++ and C# Visual Studio PVS-Studio_Cmd.exe projects, you can pass the suppression file directly. Before this, you could add suppressed warnings only at the projects and solution level.

How to speed up building ang analyzing of your project with IncrediBuild?

by Maxim Zvyagintsev

At the same time, the build completed successfully, but something really bad happened now. I had to dig into the logs, or rather, the compilation dump. That's where I found the problem. The point was that these macros are declared in the local precompiled header, whereas we only want to preprocess the file. However, the include header that was used to generate the precompiled header is different from the one that is included to the source file! The file that is used to generate the precompiled header is a 'wrapper' around the original header included into the source, and this wrapper contains all of the required macros.

PVS-Studio Learns What strlen is All About

by Andrey Karpov

Can you see it? To be honest, we did not notice it immediately and our first thought was, "Oh no, we broke something!" Then we saw what was up and took a minute to appreciate the advantages of static analysis. PVS-Studio warned: V512 A call of the 'strcpy' function will lead to overflow of the buffer 'astr'. asm.cpp 21 Still don't see the error? Let's go through the code step by step.

PVS-Studio Early Access Program

by PVS-Studio Team

PVS-Studio is a static analyzer that detects errors and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of programs written in C, C++, C#, and Java. In 2021 we are planning to release the PVS-Studio plugin for C++ IDE – CLion.

Example of How New Diagnostics Appear in PVS-Studio

by Andrey Karpov

As for application software development, it doesn't make sense to enable them. The CovidSim project could do without them. Otherwise, a user will simply drown in a huge number of messages that are of little use in this case. For example, when experimenting with this set of diagnostics, we received more than a million warnings for some medium-sized open projects. Roughly speaking, every third line of code might be faulty in the view of MISRA. No one will scrape through all warnings, much less fix them. The project is either developed immediately taking into account MISRA recommendations, or this coding standard is irrelevant for it.