Goanna Static Analysis by Red Lizard Software

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.

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.

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.
(more…)

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.

(more…)

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!

So what’s different about Goanna and why did we approach the static analysis challenge with model checking?

In case you weren’t aware; Goanna is the first static analysis tool to implement model checking after 4 years research at NICTA (National ICT Australia), which is Australia’s leading ICT government research organisation. 

The result  is that the key attributes for Goanna’s differences are as follows;
(more…)

Internally we are encouraging new team members to watch the so called Sean Tapes. There is nothing dubious about these tapes, unless you call Static Analysis and OCaml “dubious”. They are actually just screen captures, in which Sean explains how the Goanna tool performs static analysis for C/C++ code.

We are happy to share Sean’s prized voice-over with you all. Here’s the first video on the use of Goanna.

Today is a day of firsts. And this firsts doesn’t include that I got up before 8am; I did this before, even though Ralf wouldn’t believe it. Also it is not that I am wearing a shirt with a collar; this has happened before as well, last time probably when I got married. And we have even been at trade shows before with Goanna as well. (more…)