Many resources discuss the benefits of using the static analysis tools, and how they could help you improve your code base. Somehow they show you what you could gain after using them. But did you asked yourself what do you lose if you don’t use them?

Let’s take an example of a memory corruption due to free of a pointer twice, this cause random crash. It could take few hours or maybe many days to find this kind of issue. Many similar risky problems exist in C/C++ specially concerning memory corruption. Just one problem could cost few dollars or many thousands of dollars.

The impact of an issue depends also on the nature of the program, Indeed a problem in an embedded application of a machine does not have the same impact as a crash in a paint application.Sometimes one problem could cost many million of dollars or even many billions of dollars, like the case of Ariane 5 where a bug costs $7 billion.

What do you lose if you use a static analysis tool?

Let’s take as example cppcheck, which is primarily detects the types of bugs that the compilers normally do not detect. Many interesting errors are reported by this tool.

You need less than one minute to download it, maybe 20 minutes to configure it, the analysis takes a few minutes to many hours, but in this time you are free to do other tasks. After the analysis you could have thousands of potential issues, in the beginning you could focus only on priority errors.

Finally for free static analysis tools, you lose only 30 min to have a list of potential issues that could cost you many thousand of dollars.

For commercial tools you lose more than time, you have to pay it. Therefore, you lose also money. Let’s suppose that you purchase a tool with 1000$ and it helps you find a problem that needs two or three days for a developer to find it.

Three days of a C/C++ developer could cost more than 1000$, it depends of course where the company is. But if you take into account the hidden cost of one issue, you will be surprised how many a simple issue could cost to the company. Many stories exist on the web talking about the cost of simple issues.

These last two years I was interested to static analysis tools and what they could report as issues? here are some tools I used:

CppCheck (Free): Many checks are provided by CppCheck, here are some of the checks available:

Out of bounds checking

Checking exception safety

Memory leaks checking

Warn if obsolete functions are used

Check for invalid usage of STL

Check for uninitialized variables and unused functions

Clang(Free): Clang is a C/C++ compiler, its diagnostics are very interesting, you could be surprised by the relevant issues reported, it could concern:

Deprecated usage

Cast problems

Intialisation problems

OpenMP issues and more.

Vera++(Free): It’s more useful if you are interested in checking the style of your code base, here you find the Vera++ rules.

CppDepend (Commercial): This tool provides many useful metrics concerning the implementation and the design of your code base, but what’s more interesting is its code query language (CQLinq) to query the code base like a database. Therefore, you can easily create your custom rules. However, it will take you sometimes to master all its capabilities.

PVS Studio (Commercial): This tool can detect a wide range of various bugs. It’s maybe the best to detect the 64-Bit Portability Issues. the warnings reported are very precise. However, you could have many false positive issues.

Many other static analysis tools exist, some of them are easily accessible to test, for others you have to contact their companies and ask for a trial version.

If you could just lose 30 min and use cppcheck, be sure that you will not waste your time.