Goanna Static Analysis by Red Lizard Software

Another new Goanna feature is operational feedback. While Goanna is analyzing your source files, you can check to see exactly what is being done. Just select the new Goanna Statistics button from the Tool menu:

The next release of Goanna determines facts about your program from assertions. We can use this information to determine the bounds of variables and the nullity of pointers.

Goanna’s interval analysis can now catch this division by zero:

#include <assert.h>

int bad_div_of_8(int x)
{
  assert(x == 4);
  x -= 3;
  x--;
  return 8 / x;
}

Goanna for Visual Studio is out of beta. Version 1.0 is available for download now, for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2005. You can also watch a short introductory video on using Goanna here.

The forth beta release of Goanna for Visual Studio 2008 is now available. Get it here!

This release comes with some minor bug fixes, and a significant speed increase for C++ projects with large header files (like the Boost libraries). Hopefully we are nearing the end of our Beta period.

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!

To make Goanna fast enough for the desktop, we have to keep our control flow models simple. In the past we combined short-circuit operators in our models into single events, which means we missed some bugs. But some new tricks mean we can have finer-grained control flow models.
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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.

We’ve been mulling over how to add new unit tests to our OCaml codebase. Our first thought was to write a test suite apart from the code itself; we’ve already some end-to-end tests written in that way. The problem with that approach is that the tests are separated from the code they’re testing, which discourages writing tests.

A few weeks ago, we wrote some time- and heap-profiling CamlP4 macros, which add entries to a centralized table as our code runs. When the program finishes, it spits out statistics that we can examine for time and space sinks. The profiling hints — macros, that is — wrap the code to be profiled. So why not use the same approach for our tests?

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So this is it. The Goanna blog. The long awaited Goanna blog. So, what will it be like? It will probably be a place for our musing and thoughts on finding bugs. Like on how to build a tool that finds them automatically. But also about bugs that we found the traditional way, like a bug that we found in NuSMV last week, when it started to behave in unexpected way. (more…)