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A few billion lines of code

2010-02-17 04:52:57.100818+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World. Some notes by the Coverity developers about lessons learned from their code analysis tool.

I learned my lesson pretty well back in the day, even when I knew more than Lint I was (eventually) convinced that for the sake of the sanity of my coworkers and employers I should just conform to what it wanted. Later I had an opportunity to run some code through Coverity and was impressed: even with dodgy constructs where I was fairly sure the code was doing the right thing, I found that rewriting to make the static analyzer happier generally led cleaner and more readable code. But I remember being a young turk, and totally understand some of the social pushback they've gotten for their tool.

Thanks to Mark Hershberger for the pointer to the article.

[ related topics: Software Engineering ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2010-02-17 18:38:59.073667+00 by: ebradway

Fun! Reminds me of the good ol' days. Of course, I don't miss having to pour over the assembly output of the C compiler to figure out where the compiler bug was.