C++ *

It's freezing outside, everyone has already decorated the Christmas tree and bought tangerines. New Year is coming! So, it's time to meet the Top 10 interesting bugs found by the PVS-Studio C++ analyzer in 2021.

We often check large projects because it's easier to find bugs there. What if we try PVS-Studio on a small project? In this article we analyze Blend2D — a library for vector 2D graphics. Let's look at what we found.

Introduction

It's no secret that large projects have fascinating errors. It's not just "the larger the codebase is – the more errors we can find". It's also a known fact that the density of errors grows along with the codebase. That's why we love checking large projects — to treat you with a variety of "yummy" and tricky errors and typos. Besides, it's always interesting to search through a huge project with lots of dependencies, legacy code, and other stuff.

Today I'm moving away from this tradition. I decided to take a small project and see what PVS-Studio can find there. I chose Blend2D — branch master, commit c484790.

We dust off the irregular series of articles about the Chromium project check. Let's look at the code quality in the latest Chromium release and check the new features of the PVS-Studio analyzer.

This article investigates why the standard library needs a way to deduce a common type, how it is implemented and how it works.

In different programming languages, the behavior of virtual functions differs when it comes to constructors and destructors. Incorrect use of virtual functions is a classic mistake. Developers often use virtual functions incorrectly. In this article, we discuss this classic mistake.

It's cool when enthusiastic developers create a working clone of a famous game. It's even cooler when people are ready to continue the development of such projects! In this article, we check TheXTech with PVS-Studio. TheXTech is an open implementation of the game from the Super Mario universe.

One of the mechanisms of static analysis is method annotations of popular libraries. Annotations provide more information about functions during errors detecting. CARLA is an impressive open-source project in C++ that helped us implement this mechanism to our analyzer. Subsequently, the simulator became a test-target for the improved PVS-Studio static analyzer.

RPCS3 is an interesting project that emulates the PS3 console. It is actively evolving. Recently we heard the news that the emulator learned how run all the games from the console's catalog. That's a good excuse to analyze the project. We'll see which errors remained after new fixes were added to the project.

Protocol Buffers is a very popular, cool, and high-quality product that is mostly developed by Google. This is a good challenge for the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Finding at least something is already an achievement. Let's give it a shot.

We often check retro games. In our company, many developers like to find interesting projects for themselves. They feel nostalgic when they're studying these projects. But we need to run retro games on something, right? This time we checked a project that helps to run old games on modern hardware.

The PVS-Studio developers often check open-source projects and write articles about that. Sometimes, when writing an article, we come across interesting situations or epic errors. Of course, we want to write a small note about it. This is one of those cases.

Modern applications have lots of code. And the C++ language doesn't get easier. Nowadays, code reviews are not enough to fully analyze program code. Here's where static code analysis comes in.

Commercial static analyzers perform deeper and fuller code analysis compared to compilers. Let's see what PVS-Studio found in the source code of the LLVM 13.0.0 project.

I had some experience in the matching engine development for cryptocurrency exchange some time ago. That was an interesting and challenging experience. I developed it in clear C++ from scratch. The testing of it is also quite a challenging task. You need to get data for testing, perform testing, collect some statistics, and at last, analyze collected data to find weak points and bottlenecks. I want to focus on testing the C++ matching engine and show how testing can give insights for optimizations even without the need to change the code. The matching engine I developed can do more than 1’000’000 TPS (transactions per second) and is 10x times faster than the matching engine of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange (see one post on Binance Blog).

For the first time PVS-Studio provided support for the CWE classification in the 6.21 release. It took place on January 15, 2018. Years have passed since then and we would like to tell you about the improvements related to the support of this classification in the latest analyzer version.

In May 2021, CppCast recorded a podcast called ABI stability (CppCast #300). In this podcast, Marshall Clow and the hosts discussed rather old news — Visual Studio compilers support the AddressSantitzer tool. We have already integrated ASan into our testing system a long time ago. Now we want to tell you about a couple of interesting errors it found.

A couple of years ago the PVS-Studio analyzer got its first diagnostic rules to check program code compliance with the MISRA C and MISRA C++ standards. We collected feedback and saw that our clients were interested in using the analyzer to check their projects for MISRA compliance. So, we decided to further develop the analyzer in this direction. The article covers the MISRA C/C++ standard and the MISRA Compliance report. It also shows what we already managed to do and what we plan to achieve by the end of the year.

If you are strongly interested in MISRA and would like to understand whether your project meets one of the MISRA association's standards, there is a solution. It's name is MISRA Compliance. PVS-Studio has recently learned how to generate the MISRA Compliance report. This article describes how you can use this feature. This can make somebody's life better.

On August 25th, 2021, the Linux kernel celebrated its 30th anniversary. Since then, it's changed a lot. We changed too. Nowadays, the Linux kernel is a huge project used by millions. We checked the kernel 5 years ago. So, we can't miss this event and want to look at the code of this epic project again.

Recently PVS-Studio has implemented a major feature—we supported intermodular analysis of C++ projects. This article covers our and other tools' implementations. You'll also find out how to try this feature and what we managed to detect using it.