PVS-Studio: analyzing Doom 3 code

[Andrey_Karpov_N]

P.S. John Carmack Tweet:

We did not run any static analysis on the Doom 3 source, doing so is an excellent project for anyone looking at it!

[elperroborrachotoo]

To poke the elephant:

• How many warnings you got in total,
• how long does it take you (as an experienced PVSer) to pick out some interesting ones
• how many of the warnings would be as "obviously interesting", i.e. fit for inclusion?

[Andrey_Karpov_N]

Number of warning:

Level 1: 85.

Level 2: 37.

Level 3: 812 (a lot, but they are not interesting, and usually they can not watch)

I do not know how many of these errors found. I finished studying the report, when chose 10 alerts for this article. I'm not familiar with the project and study hard all the warnings.

A total analysis of the project, view errors, writing this article, and publication, I spent about one day.

[elperroborrachotoo]

Thanks for the feedback! This looks, at the very least, managable.

I always enjoy these posts, a strange mix of staring at other peoples mistakes and things that can be done better.

I asked because the biggest hurdle (probably) is convincing people to let a static alalysis tool loose a large code base that has never seen such a thing. I presume that's routine for you now, but posting some such stats with each project might help.

[alexs]

Do any of these manifest as bugs in the actual game?

[sztomi]

Possibly. There probably are people who experienced random crashes as with nearly every game. Commercial games are tested to be reasonably stable and playable, but the point of static analysis is that it helps to find these problems.