Any Tools to Catch Silly Mistakes in C Code?

Question

I had a nasty typo that wasted my time and my colleague\'s time, it was something like this:

for (i = 0; i < blah; i++); // <- I had a semi-colon here, tha         


        

Answer 1

I would suggest seeing if you have the ability to enforce MISRA standards. They were written with great thought and many rules that are simple for a compiler to check. For example, A rule I use requires all NOP commands have their own line. This means when you put a ; on the end of a loop statement it will through an error saying that it is not on it's own line.

Answer 2

A few things that have saved me in the past, from the top of my head:

• Use if (3 == bla) rather than (bla == 3), because if you misspell and type (3 = bla) the compiler will complain.

• Use the all-warnings switch. Your compiler should warn you about empty statements like that.

• Use assertions when you can and program defensively. Put good effort into making your program fail early, you will see the weaknesses that way.

• Don't try to circumvent any safeguards the compiler or the OS have put in place. They are there for your ease of programming aswell.

Answer 3

GCC has most of the functionality that Lint has had built in via the warning flags.

Answer 4

Any good GUI programming environment ("IDE" - Integrated Development Environment) like Eclipse would generate a warning in a case like that.

Answer 5

QA·C by Programming Research is another good static analysis tool for C.

Answer 6

In this (old) version of How to Shoot Yourself In the Foot, and in many other versions around the web, C is always the language that allows for the simplest procedure. When programming in C, you have to remember this and be careful. If you want protection, choose another language.

This saying is attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup (C++) himself. To (mis)quote:

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot"