SAL at Microsoft

[bearophile]

It's the first time I read an article that explains the working life at Microsoft:
http://foredecker.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/working-at-microsoft-day-to-day-coding/

This is one interesting thing:

>Windows does have some Windows wide common coding practices. For example, we use SAL annotations on all our code. This is non-negotiable and you can’t check your code in unless it has SAL annotations – there are automated tools to check this. SAL annotations are vitally important; they enable static analysis tools to perform very deep analysis of native C/C++ code. This is a great bug finding tool – especially for reliability and security bugs.<


The SAL (Microsoft's standard source code annotation language):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms235402%28VS.80%29.aspx

_deref/_deref_opt/_opt: In D I have suggested the @ suffix to denote nonnull pointers/references.

__checkReturn: GCC has a similar annotation, I have suggested something similar for D too.

__fallthrough: we have discussed something related or better.

__format_string/__callback: interesting, but I don't understand why they are useful.

_full/_part: seems interesting.

Bye,
bearophile