Apache Dubbo is one of the most popular Java projects on GitHub. It's not surprising. It was created 8 years ago and is widely applied as a high-performance RPC environment. Of course, most of the bugs in its code have long been fixed and the quality of the code is maintained at a high level. However, there is no reason to opt out of checking such an interesting project using the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Let's see how it turned out.

It has been three months since 2018 had ended. For many, it has just flew by, but for us, PVS-Studio developers, it was quite an eventful year. We were working up a sweat, fearlessly competing for spreading the word about static analysis and were searching for errors in open source projects, written in C, C++, C#, and Java languages. In this article, we gathered the top 10 most interesting of them right for you!

While Stockholm was holding the 118th Nobel Week, I was sitting in our office, where we develop the PVS-Studio static analyzer, working on an analysis review of the ROOT project, a big-data processing framework used in scientific research. This code wouldn't win a prize, of course, but the authors can definitely count on a detailed review of the most interesting defects plus a free license to thoroughly check the project on their own.

Introduction

ROOT is a modular scientific software toolkit. It provides all the functionalities needed to deal with big data processing, statistical analysis, visualisation and storage. It is mainly written in C++. ROOT was born at CERN, at the heart of the research on high-energy physics. Every day, thousands of physicists use ROOT applications to analyze their data or to perform simulations.

Our support chats and some other indirect signs showed that there are many students among our free users. Here's the reason: PVS-Studio is now more often used by professors in courses related to software development. We are very pleased with this, and we decided to write this small article to fall under notice of other teachers. We are pleased that students become acquainted with the methodology of static code analysis in general and the PVS-Studio tool in particular. Our team will try to contribute to this trend.

We welcome any chatting on code quality. Our clients, students, and other users from all corners of the Internet write to us. Regardless of the country, time zone or language. Well, speaking language, not programming. Among programming languages, we are so far interested in a limited set. Right now, it's C, C++, C# and Java. There are many benefits from communication. We implement some users' suggestions immediately, because they are really useful. Often we just lend a hand with someone's project by explaining analyzer warnings, which end up being errors. This note is about such case.

Travis CI is a distributed web service for building and testing software that uses GitHub as a source code hosting service. In addition to the above scripts, you can add your own, thanks to the extensive configuration options. In this article we will set up Travis CI for working with PVS-Studio by the example of PPSSPP code.

.NET Core libraries is one of the most popular C# projects on GitHub. It's hardly a surprise, since it's widely known and used. Owing to this, an attempt to reveal the dark corners of the source code is becoming more captivating. So this is what we'll try to do with the help of the PVS-Studio static analyzer. What do you think – will we eventually find something interesting?

In this article, I'm going to tell you about PVS-Studio, an analyzer for C and C++ code, and show you how to use it in the Visual C++ environment. This guide is specifically intended for beginner users.

Once in a while, programmers who start getting acquainted with the PVS-Studio code analyzer ask me: «Is there a list of warnings that accurately indicate errors?» There is no such list because uninteresting (false) warnings in one project are very important and useful in another one. However, one can definitely start digging into the analyzer from the most exciting warnings. Let's take a closer look at this topic.

Sometimes people ask the question, which addresses a certain topic but is actually about another thing. As the saying goes, a competently asked question contains half the answer.

Recently I've returned from the JPoint conference, where we first presented our new PVS-Studio analyzer for Java. Interest in static analysis is growing strongly in the last few years, so the audience perceived PVS-Studio enthusiastically. In addition to the positive feedback, as it happens, we had to handle objections. The most frequent objection to the suggestion to try PVS-Studio sounds something like this: «C'mon, why do we try PVS-Studio? We use IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, SonarLint and SonarQube. We've run PVS-Studio recently and it found errors, already highlighted by IntelliJ IDEA!»

I just can't help but write a small reply note to this comment. I even have two responses to this objection. And yes, I intentionally stated ReSharper, as there are some questions to our C# analyzer as well. Well, here comes the answer.

Java developers have access to a number of useful tools that help to write high-quality code such as the powerful IDE IntelliJ IDEA, free analyzers SpotBugs, PMD, and the like. The developers working on CUBA Platform have already been using all of these, and this review will show how the project can benefit even more from the use of the static code analyzer PVS-Studio.

PVS-Studio is a tool for detecting bugs and potential vulnerabilities in the source code of programs written in C, C++, C#, or Java, and is also a Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tool. It is meant to be used as part of the CI practice and allows the user to detect bugs at the earliest development stages, where they cost almost nothing to fix.

Starting from the version 7.04, the PVS-Studio analyzer for C and C++ languages on Linux and macOS provides the test feature of checking the list of specified files. Using the new mode, you can configure the analyzer to check commits and pull requests. This article covers setting up the check of certain modified files from a GitHub project in such popular CI (Continuous Integration) systems, as Travis CI, Buddy and AppVeyor.

CMake is a cross-platform system for automating project builds. This system is much older than the PVS-Studio static code analyzer, but no one has tried to apply the analyzer on its code and review the errors. As it turned out, there are a lot of them. The CMake audience is huge. New projects start on it and old ones are ported. I shudder to think of how many developers could have had any given error.

This is a short story about how PVS-Studio helped us find an error in the source code of the library used in PVS-Studio. And it was not a theoretical error but an actual one — the error appeared in practice when using the library in the analyzer.

PVS-Studio supports analyzing projects developed in C, C++, C#, and Java. You can use the analyzer under Windows, Linux, and macOS. This small article will tell you the basics of analyzing C and C++ code in Linux environment.

Installation

There are different ways to install PVS-Studio under Linux, depending on your distro type. The most convenient and preferred method is to use the repository, since it allows auto-updating the analyzer upon releasing new versions. Another option is to use the installation package, which you can get here.

A PVS-Studio team and our product make a great contribution to upgrading of software quality. Moreover, in addition to detecting errors in closed and open source projects, there is an indirect contribution to the development of compilers and other tools of code analysis. We are pleased that in some cases we are trendsetters and we decided to dedicate a small note to this in our blog.

Our attention was recently attracted by the Electronic Arts repository on GitHub. It's tiny, and of the twenty-three projects available there, only a few C++ libraries seemed interesting: EASTL, EAStdC, EABase, EAThread, EATest, EAMain, and EAAssert. The projects themselves are tiny too (about 10 files each), so bugs were found only in the «largest» project of 20 files :D But we did find them, and they do look interesting! As I was writing this post, we were also having a lively discussion of EA games and the company's policy :D

Readers of our articles occasionally note that the PVS-Studio static code analyzer detects a large number of errors that are insignificant and don't affect the application. It is really so. For the most part, important bugs have already been fixed due to manual testing, user feedback, and other expensive methods. At the same time, many of these errors could have been found at the code writing stage and corrected with minimal loss of time, reputation and money. This article will provide several examples of real errors, which could have been immediately fixed, if project authors had used static code analysis.

This is the second post in our series of articles about the results of checking open-source software working with the RDP protocol. Today we are going to take a look at the rdesktop client and xrdp server.