Coverity tool

[Brad Roberts]

On Tue, 9 Feb 2010, Walter Bright wrote:

> @safe guarantees memory safety, so these are non-issues in D.
> 
> Using @safe makes these non-issues.
> 
> As you say, exceptions solve these problems.
> 
> It is a mistake to rely on the GC to free resources other than memory.
> Properly, either RAII or scope guard statements should be used, as these do
> not leak.
> 
> No analysis tool can help you if you initialize things to the wrong value.
> That's very, very different from initializing things to GARBAGE and then using
> those garbage values.
> 
> We've certainly had long threads about this one. I'll just state that turning
> on the optimizer will detect many cases of dereferencing null pointers.
> 
> dmd already flags dead code.

Nice black and white world you are acting like you live in there Walter.  
I know you know better, so why do you pretend otherwise?

You're assuming perfect use of the language and largely simple code.  
Granted, there's a lot of things that D does better, and the tools in the 
language make it easier to write better code... but developers are corner 
cutters at heart.  Additionally, not everything can be done in @safe (or 
it wouldn't be an optional mode), and not everything can use RAII for 
resource management.

Coverity, as has been discussed here in the past, is a very powerful tool 
that solves very real world problems... at an astronomical price.  A 
sort-of close cousin to Coverity is Fortify.  Fortify has a security slant 
to it, but is solving essentially the same class of problems.

Compilers do, in concept, a lot of the things that Coverity does, but at a 
very different scale.  Coverty is aimed at whole application long range 
effect analysis.  It's got good tools for over-time analysis of builds to 
help ensure incremental improvements (ie, prevent quality slipping 
backwards).  All in all, it's well engineered for large systems and large 
teams.

I wish I had access to it for everthing I develop.  Sadly, the cost is too 
high.

Later,
Brad