Last week, Visual Studio 2019 version 16.5 Preview 2 was released, bringing many new features and improvements for developers in Visual Studio to help you build better software faster. Please read some highlights of new features and improved developer experiences in this page.



Install this preview side-by-side with your Visual Studio release and try these highlighted features without replacing your current development environment.

If you're reading this text, you've either thought that something was wrong with the headline or you've seen the name of a familiar computer game. VVVVVV is an indie platformer game that has stolen the hearts of many players by its pleasant external simplicity and no less pleasant internal complexity. A few days ago, VVVVVV turned 10 years, and the author of the game — Terry Cavanagh — celebrated this holiday by publishing its source code. What mind-boggling things is it hiding? Read the answer in this article.

Visual Studio 2019 versions 16.3 and 16.4 include improvements to the C++ inliner. Among these is the ability to inline some routines after they have been optimized, referred to as the «Zipliner.» Depending on your application, you may see some minor code quality improvements and/or major build-time (compiler throughput) improvements. 

Perhaps every microcontroller software developer has heard about special coding standards to help improve the code security and portability. One of such standards is MISRA. In this article, we'll take a closer look at what this standard is, its concept and how to use it in your projects.

Another year is drawing to an end, and it's a perfect time to make yourself a cup of coffee and reread the reviews of bugs collected across open-source projects over this year. This would take quite a while, of course, so we prepared this article to make it easier for you. Today we'll be recalling the most interesting dark spots that we came across in open-source C/C++ projects in 2019.

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Passing parameters to a function

When passing parameter to a function, category of a passed expression is implicitly converted to the category of function parameter: void f(TO_TYPE p); FROM_TYPE x; f(x); This implicit conversion takes place the same way as during an assignment (see "Assignment" section above) except that function definition cannot contain "auto" types.

The goal of this quick reference is to collect in one place and organize information about value categories in C++, assignment, parameter passing and returning from functions. I tried to make this quick reference convenient to quickly compare and select one of solutions possible, this is why I made several tables here.

For introduction to the topic, please use the following links:

C++ rvalue references and move semantics for beginners
Rvalues redefined
C++ moves for people who don’t know or care what rvalues are
Scott Meyers. Effective Modern C++. 2015
Understanding Move Semantics and Perfect Forwarding: Part 1
Understanding Move Semantics and Perfect Forwarding: Part 2
Understanding Move Semantics and Perfect Forwarding: Part 3
Do we need move and copy assignment

During the summer of 2019, Huawei gave a series of presentations announcing the Ark Compiler technology. The company claims that this open-source project will help developers make the Android system and third-party software much more fluent and responsive. By tradition, every new promising open-source project goes through PVS-Studio for us to evaluate the quality of its code.

Introduction

The Ark Compiler was first announced by Huawei at the launch of the new smartphone models P30 and P30 Pro. It is claimed that the Ark Compiler will improve the fluency of the Android system by 24% and response speed by 44%. Third-party Android applications will also gain a 60% speed-up after recompilation with the Ark Compiler. The open-source version of the project is called OpenArkCompiler; its source code is available on Gitee, a Chinese fork of GitHub.

This article continues the series of publications on usage of PVS-Studio in cloud systems. This time we'll look at the way the analyzer works along with GitLab CI, which is a product made by GitLab Inc. Static analyzer integration in a CI system allows detecting bugs right after the project build and is a highly effective way to reduce the cost of finding bugs.

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.

On October 7, 2019, Apple released a new version of its Mac operating system, macOS Catalina. Version 10.15 contains many changes and improvements. One of the significant is the complete phasing out of 32-bit applications. As a developer of such macOS apps, what can you do? That's right, port the app to the 64-bit platform. Will the application work properly from the first attempt? Perhaps, it's possible. Depends on the complexity and amount of the code. But most likely, developers will face a lot of non-obvious errors, which can previously detected using PVS-Studio.

This is a new piece of our series of articles about using the PVS-Studio static analyzer with cloud CI systems. Today we are going to look at another service, CircleCI. We'll take the Kodi media player application as a test project and see if we can find any interesting bugs in its source code.

Telegram Open Network (TON) is a platform by the same team that developed the Telegram messenger. In addition to the blockchain, TON provides a large set of services. The developers recently made the platform's code, which is written in C++, publicly available and uploaded it to GitHub. We decided to check the project before its official release.

Celestia is a three-dimensional space simulator. Simulation of the space allows exploring our universe in three dimensions. Celestia is available on Windows, Linux and macOS. The project is very small and PVS-Studio detected few defects in it. Despite this fact, we'd like to pay attention to it, as it's a popular educational project and it will be rather useful to somehow improve it. By the way, this program is used in popular films, series and programs for showing space. This fact, in turns, raises requirements to the code quality.

The adventures with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client began with automatic update to version 68.0. More text in pop-up notifications and default dark theme are the notable features of this version. Occasionally I found an error that I immediately craved to detect with static analysis. This became the reason to go for another check of the project source code using PVS-Studio. It so happened that by the time of the analysis, the bug had already been fixed. However, since we've paid some attention to the project, there's no reason not to write about other found defects.

Introduction

The dark theme of the new Thunderbird version looks pretty. I like dark themes. I've already switched to them in messengers, Windows, macOS. Soon iPhone will be updated to iOS 13 with a dark theme. For this reason I even had to change my iPhone 5S for a newer model. In practice, it turned out that a dark theme requires more effort for developers to pick up the colors of the interface. Not everyone can handle it the first time.

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.

This article focuses on the specifics of checking Unreal Engine projects with the PVS-Studio static analyser on the Windows operating system: how to install the analyser, check a project, where and how to view an error report.

Summer is not only a holiday season, but also time of fruitful work. Sunny days are so inspiring that there's enough energy both for late walks and large code commits. The second summer PVS-Studio 7.04 release turned out to be quite large, so we suggest for your attention this press release, in which we'll tell you about everything.

Boundary representation (B-rep) is the primary method of representing modeled objects in most geometric kernels, including our C3D Modeler kernel. The core algorithms that edit models, such as applying fillet operations, performing cutting operations, and obtaining flat projections require the precision of B-rep representations. The rapidly growing variety of 3D data in polygonal formats makes the task of model transformations from polygons into boundary representation increasingly relevant. As a result, we developed a new SDK, C3D B-Shaper, which is part of our C3D Toolkit.

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.