PVS-Studio 7.10 Release: OWASP, AUTOSAR, SARIF

by Andrey Karpov

Utilities for converting PVS-Studio analysis results (PlogConverter.exe for Windows and plog-converter for Linux\macOS) now support conversion to SARIF (Static Analysis Results Interchange Format). SARIF is a universal open format for presenting the results of tools that search for errors, safety and security defects. This format is supported by many static analyzers and allows you to combine various code quality control tools in a single ecosystem.

Checking Clang 11 with PVS-Studio

by Andrey Karpov

The programmer is using a modulo operation to get a random value of either 0 or 1. But the value 1 seems to confuse developers and make them write the classic anti-pattern in which the modulo operation is performed on 1 instead of 2. The X % 1 operation is meaningless as it always evaluates to 0.

Checking a Header-Only C++ Library Collection (awesome-hpp)

by Andrey Karpov

A note for library developers. You can use PVS-Studio to check open-source projects for free. To get a free license to use with your open-source project, please fill in this form.

Part 2: Upsetting Opinions about Static Analyzers

by Andrey karpov

And started coming up with cases when it might be justified, which means that the PVS-Studio analyzer warning was a false-positive. Some speculations about the change in memory between two checks came into play which occurs due to:

• running parallel threads;
• signal/interrupt handlers;
• the variable X is a reference to the element A[0];
• hardware, such as performing DMA operations;
• and so on.

After heated debate on the analyzer's inability to comprehend all cases, they left to cut down forest with axes. In other words, they found an excuse why they could still avoid using a static code analyzer in their work.

Upsetting Opinions about Static Analyzers

by Andrey Karpov

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.

PVS-Studio 7.09

by Andrey Karpov

New general analysis diagnostics:

•     V1059. Macro name overrides a keyword/reserved name. This may lead to undefined behavior.
•     V1060. Passing 'BSTR ' to the 'SysAllocString' function may lead to incorrect object creation.
•     V1061. Extending 'std' or 'posix' namespace may result in undefined behavior.
•     V1062. Class defines a custom new or delete operator. The opposite operator must also be defined.
•     V1063. The modulo by 1 operation is meaningless. The result will always be zero.

PVS-Studio: analyzing pull requests in Azure DevOps using self-hosted agents

by Alexey Govorov

The result is a build system based on MSBuild for C++, with Chocolatey for installing PVS-Studio, CMake, and Git. Vcpkg is built for convenient management of the libraries that the project depends on. Also, we have to download the latest version of the Azure Pipelines Agent. To initialize the agent from the ENTRYPOINT Docker file, the PowerShell script 'entrypoint.ps1' is called, to which you need to add the URL of the project's "organization", the token of the agent pool, and the PVS-Studio license parameters....

PVS-Studio is now in Compiler Explorer

by George Gribkov

If you want to see the output of your program, you can open the execution window by clicking "Add new... - > Execution only" in the code editor (not in the compiler window). In the gif below, you can see the output of the lab work taken from our page about free usage of PVS-Studio by students and teachers.

ModernCppStarter & PVS-Studio Static Code Analyzer

by PVS-Studio Team

plog-converter will convert the report into the errorfile format (similar to GCC's messages), which can be conveniently viewed in a terminal window and the IDE. You can also have the report converted to an HTML file by using the -t fullhtml flag. Use the flags -a and -d to filter diagnostics. Run the plog-converter --help command to view the full list of available options.

A Note of Caution about Using PVS-Studio on godbolt.org (Compiler Explorer)

by Andrey Karpov

This may be promising from the perspective of satisfying one's curiosity, writing articles, and so on. But there's a downside to it too: rather than using synthetic examples to explore or try out the tool, people may start relying on them to evaluate and compare it against other analyzers. And this is a very bad approach because the results will be unreliable and dependent on how the test examples are written.