Goanna Static Analysis by Red Lizard Software

Goanna version 1.2 has been released. Download it now.

The major change is More Checks, in fact 40% more than were previously available in v1.1. Over the next few months we will continue to add new checks with each release. You can expect to see up to 100 additional high quality checks within the coming 6 months, which as usual will be free for all existing customers. Additionally, should you require a 30 day Trial Extension for your version 1.2 update please complete this trial extension request form.

We are also very pleased to announce the Beta release of Goanna for Command Line. This new command line version enables more flexibility and freedom for those wishing to integrate our powerful C/C++ static analyzer into their own development process. The Beta is currently available for Linux users and a version for Windows users is scheduled to be available in May. Linux users can now access a fully gcc-compatible solution integrated with over 60 classes of flow-sensitive quality checks to detect critical bugs as early as possible in the development cycle.

Inter-procedural analysis is also well under way, so stay tuned for a public Beta release soon!

We’re proud to have been selected for simultaneous shipment of our Goanna static analysis extension with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Here is a short introductory video demonstrating our Visual Studio 2010 integration, and we’re on schedule for April release:

We have some further news regarding recent developments (more high quality checks being one) and we’ll be posting more information next week.

Goanna for Visual Studio 1.1 has been released. Download  it now. Changes include:

Fixed a constructor initialization false positive.

Fixed several unused variable false positives related to complex types in C++.

Include paths can now end in a backslash.

Accelerator keys: Alt+F1 (run Goanna on the Solution) and Alt+F2 (Run Goanna on the active project).

Several new checks, including:

Comparison never holds

Comparison always holds

Switch case is unreachable

Expanded the interval analysis.

Checks are now organized by category in the settings dialog.

Underlining (”Squiggles”) of warning-relevant code in the Visual Studio text editor.

Statistics page for monitoring Goanna’s progress.

Analysis of assert() statements for variable bounds.

Improved traces.

Much more internal work has been done, laying the groundwork for inter-procedural analysis and user-defined checks. Visual Studio 2010 support is well underway.

We have made Beta 3 of Goanna for Visual Studio 2008 available. There are many bug fixes and user interface enhancements, including:

• Right-click support for Solution Folders.
• A Goanna icon on the toolbar.
• Control-flow ordering of short-circuit operators (&& and ||).
• Solution-wide settings panel.
• Several common false positives have been eliminated.
• Auto-detection of less common MSVC macros in the build process.

You can download it now!

Just to let you know that Goanna for Visual Studio is now available for download. We are classing it as Beta at this time yet we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made so far, and trust that you will be too. We very much look forward to any and all feedback on this release, and welcome comments to Ralf via ralf[at]redlizards.com . Thank you for your patience and we look foward to hearing from you.

I used to be a keen windsurfer and once attended a training camp/holiday in Greece. We covered advanced maneuvers such as 360’s, forward rolls and duck gybes etc. The instructor always said, “Doesn’t matter if you pull it off, just so long as it looks good!”

The reason for this story is that at Red Lizards we have a mantra of “Bringing higher quality software to market faster”, and so the flip side of this coin is that we can’t ship a release until it is of sufficiently high quality. Double edged sword perhaps, yet this is the business we chose.

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The visual studio version of Goanna is almost ready:

This is the plugin being run over one of the PLT Scheme projects, mzscheme. A major part of our testing routine is using Goanna on open source projects.

We will have a trial version of our Visual Studio plugin for you soon!

OCaml is a wonderful language. But as with any language, there are certain features you would like to see.

The obvious one in OCaml is the lack of type-classes, specifically the lack of Haskell’s Show. There is no more useful debugging tool than printf, and it is a pain trying to debug complex types when you can’t see them.

This is where s-expressions come in. Specifically, Jane Street’s s-expression library.

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Pascal Cuoq made an interesting comment on my last post about C developers accidentally writing “==” in OCaml when they meant to use “=”. It reminds me of a similar issue I run into, when I am writing in OCaml but thinking in Haskell, and I am confronted with a value of type:

   'a option list

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We have a set of end-to-end tests that run on Goanna every night. This ensures that our commits during the day don’t break our development tree too badly.

Here is one of those tests. It was producing a strange result.

void example(void) {
  int *x;
  x = malloc(sizeof(int));
  free(x);
  if (rand()) {
    x = malloc(sizeof(int));
  }

  *x++;
}

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