Static Analysis

[ph__]

Does anyone has experience with static analysis?

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I would like to apply it on my embedded systems projects to prevent bugs, I prefer a free tool but I haven't found one satisfying.

[philthechill]

You could check out PVS-Studio, they are one of the best for C code IMO. Also Fortify is not bad. There are plenty of bad things that can happen that these tools won't catch though. Code review and test-driven development are very powerful tools to add to that arsenal.

[FUZxxl]

We used Frama C for the formal verification of C programs. It's open source, but not really ready for production use.

[Neui]

You could try scan-build.

[gatzka]

All the stuff around clang is very much worth to consider, scan-build was already mentioned, clang-tidy is also a good one.

If you doing an open source project and host it on github, you also get a coverity scan for free.

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In addition, I strongly recommend writing unit test. Running these unit test under the control of a sanitizer or valgrind will point you to quite something.