News from www.viva64.com

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.61

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.61:

Fixed crash in VS2010 with EnableAllWarnings key enabled in project settings.
Fixed bug related to analysis projects that does excluded from build in Configuration Manager.
The analysis of the code is considerably improved.

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.60

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.60:

New rule V122: Memsize type is used in the struct/class.
New rule V303: The function is deprecated in the Win64 system. It is safer to use the NewFOO function.
New rule V320: A call of the FOO function will lead to a buffer overflow or underflow in a 64-bit system.
New rule <A class=link-outer href

Our workers visited the GDC2010 conference

Wed, 19 May 2010 10:00:00 +0300

Our workers visited the GDC2010 conference that was held on May, 14-16, 2010, in Moscow and talked to many developers who participated there.

Game Developer Conference (GDC) is an official forum in Russian conducted �by developers for developers� and publishers of personal computer, play station, online and social network games as well as games for arcade machines, mobile phones and various other platforms. Recognized experts in various spheres of game development � from specifics of programming and character modeling to project management and after-sales maintenance � read about 100 lectures and seminars at GDC every year. Besides, the annual GDC exhibition Expo presents contemporary software, services and platforms for developers and also new game projects which have not been released on market yet.

While communicating with developers from the game industry, we again get convinced that 64-bit technologies are still of little interest for those who develop games to be installed on a user computer. 64 bits are already being widely used on the server side in mass multiplayer online role play games (MMORPG). But developers do not plan to create 64-bit versions of their games until 99% of users have a 64-bit Windows version installed.

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.53

Fri, 07 May 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.53:

"What Is It" feature is added. Now you can ask PVS-Studio developers about diagnistic messages produced by our analyzer.
The analysis of the code related to usage of unnamed structures is considerably improved.
Fixed bug in structure size evaluation in certain cases.

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.52

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.52.

New online help has been added. The previous help system integrated
into MSDN. It was not very convenient for some reasons (both for us
and users). Now PVS-Studio will open the help system on our site. We
refused to integrate it into MSDN anymore. As before, the pdf-version
of the documentation is also available.
We stopped supporting Windows 2000.
The settings page "Exclude From Analysis" was deleted – there is now
the page "Don't Check Files" instead.
Work in Visual Studio 2010 was improved.
We eliminated the issue of integration into VS2010 whenreinstalling.
We fixed work of the function "Mark As False Alarm" with read-only
files.

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.51

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.51.

PVS-Studio supports Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
New rule: V003: Unrecognized error found...
New rule: V121: Implicit conversion of the type of 'new' operator's argument to size_t type.
You may specify filemasks on the tab "Don't Check Files" to exclude some files from analysis.
"Exclude From Analysis" option page improved
MoreThan2Gb option removed from "Viva64" option page (this option is deprecated)
If you want check code from command line then you must indicate analyzer type (Viva64 or VivaMP)

A new version of the code analyzer PVS-Studio 3.50 is released

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We released a new version of PVS-Studio code analyzer - PVS-Studio 3.50. There are seven important innovations in the new version each of which is very useful.

PVS-Studio supports Visual Studio 2010 RC. Although Visual Studio has not been released officially yet, we have already added the support for this environment into the analyzer. Now PVS-Studio integrates into Visual Studio 2010 and can analyze projects in this environment. Help system in Visual Studio 2010 has been changed, so the Help section of PVS-Studio does not integrate into the documentation yet as it is done in Visual Studio 2005/2008. But you still may use online-Help. Support of Visual Studio 2010 RC is not complete.
A new PDF-version of Help system is available. Now we ship a 50-page PDF-document in the PVS-Studio distribution kit. It is a full copy of our Help system (that integrates into MSDN in Visual Studio 2005/2008 and is available online).
PVS-Studio now has a new mechanism that automatically checks for new versions of the tool on our site. Checking for the updates is managed through the new option CheckForNewVersions in the settings tab called "Common Analyzer Settings". If the option CheckForNewVersions is set to True, a special text file is downloaded from www.viva64.com site when you launch code testing (the commands Check Current File, Check Current Project, Check Solution in PVS-Studio menu). This file contains the number of the latest PVS-Studio version available on the site. If the version on the site is newer than the version installed on the user computer, the user will be asked for a permission to update the tool. If the user agrees, a special separate application PVS-Studio-Updater will be launched that will automatically download and install the new PVS-Studio distribution kit. If the option CheckForNewVersions is set to False, it will not check for the updates.
We have implemented the support for the standard C++0x at the level it was done in Visual Studio 2010. Now it supports lambda expressions, auto, decltype, static_assert, nullptr, etc. In the future, as C++0x support in Visual C++ is developing, the analyzer PVS-Studio will also provide support for the new C++ language capabilities.
Now you can check solutions with PVS-Studio from the command line instead of Visual Studio environment. Note that we still mean that the checking will be performed from Visual Studio involving the files of projects (.vcproj) and solutions (.sln) but it will be launched from the command line instead of IDE. This way of launching the tool may be useful when you need to regularly check the code with the help of build systems or continuous integration systems.
New rule V1212: Data race risk. When accessing the array 'foo' in a parallel loop, different indexes are used for writing and reading.
We added a code signature certificate in the new version of our tool. It is done for you to be sure that the distribution kit is authentic, and get fewer warnings from the operating system when installing the application.

We hope that both our current and new users will like the new version of PVS-Studio tool.

New design of our site

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0300

We have developed and introduced a new design for the site www.viva64.com. We proceeded from the following tasks while developing it:

To simplify the site navigation and make the site sections more comprehensible.
To simplify the access to those site sections devoted to the code analyzer PVS-Studio. Now you may go to the page of downloading or purchasing the analyzer and see the documentation on the program from any page.
To present the information that would be useful not only for PVS-Studio users but for all application developers in a more convenient and clear form. Now you may get from any site page through a special menu "For Developers" to the sections "Our Articles", "64-bit Lessons" (lessons of 64-bit software development), "Knowledge Base" (the knowledge base of issues related to 64-bit and parallel software development), "Terminology" (special terms used in the articles), "Article Reviews" (our reviews of third-party papers published on the Internet), "Blog" (our notes on software development).

We hope that we have fulfilled these tasks by introducing the new design. This is how our site looked before:

This is the new design:

Please tell us if there are some troubles with the new design or if you find some innovations inconvenient.

We have a knowledge base of issues related to 64-bit and parallel software development at our site

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0300

The main method of promoting our program product PVS-Studio is to tell the developers about the type issues this tool can solve.

Note. PVS-Studio is an add-in module for Visual Studio 2005/2008 (and 2010 soon) that allows you to detect a lot of various errors in 64-bit and parallel OpenMP applications. PVS-Studio is a contemporary interactive static C/C++ code analyzer. By 'interactive', for instance, we mean the capability of warning filtration and suppression without relaunching the analysis.

The main way of promoting our tool is to write and publish technical papers on various programmer sites, for example: CodeProject, Intel Software Network, DreamInCode. Of course, all our articles are available on our site as well.

We found out with time that not every idea/material may be conveniently presented in the form of an article. Some notes were too small and could not pretend to be papers while we did not want to enlarge them artificially. Some other notes concerned only one particular feature of PVS-Studio and did not tend to be papers too. So we decided to create a blog on our site and have been publishing various ideas there since that moment.

Absence of explanations of some terms that could be not quite clear to the readers appeared to be another drawback of our articles. But links and notes overload the text and break the coherence of the articles. We found the way out by creating the section terminology on our site where you may find a lot of explanations and definitions and additional links to external resources.

But we did stop classification of our materials there. Not so long ago we created a new section called "knowledge base ". Here we lay out materials concerning particular questions developers ask when creating 64-bit and parallel software. There are few notes in the base for the present, but we will regularly enlarge it and in some time you will be able to find answers to many most urgent questions there. Now you may see the following posts:

Reviews of articles on static analysis, 64-bit and parallel programming

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:00:00 +0300

Do you want to be abreast of the articles written by the authors all over the world on the most contemporary topics (static analysis, 64-bit and parallel programming)? Do you want to know what articles you should read first? We have a new section "Article reviews" on our site viva64.com.

While carrying out investigations in the sphere of developing tools for 64-bit and parallel software developers, we, naturally, study publications by various authors on these topics. But people interested in them find it difficult to get familiar with all the articles because one has to look for them somewhere and it is not very easy.

That is why we decided to make brief reviews (up to 2 paragraphs) for these articles. These are neither abstracts, nor author-generated summaries and nor user-generated content. The reviews of the articles are written by our colleagues who are always involved in this sphere.

All the article reviews are arranged in three groups:

Here are some examples of the reviews.

64-Bit Programming Models: Why LP64.

In the world of rapidly developing programming technologies it is important for all software developers to decide what standard and programming model to choose as universal to save time and money. The Open Group argues that LP64 programming model be the best solution for 64-bit programming. This conclusion is drawn from the results of analysis and comparison of ILP64 and LP64 models against several evaluation criteria, each being thoroughly commented and explained. Among these the authors list portability, interoperability with 32-bit environments, standards conformance, performance effects and transition costs.

Herb Sutter. The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software.

In his article, Herb Sutter discusses the problem of concurrency becoming the next approaching revolution for software development, its causes, consequences and costs. A major part of the paper is devoted to analyzing the current state in the computer industry and explaining why sequential applications cannot benefit from the throughput gains any more and must yield to concurrent (mainly multithreaded) software; and how to deal with this problem as well. The paper is written in a lively and ironical manner but provides a truly serious and thorough review of the coming changes. Sure, it will be interesting and helpful for every developer.

Raoul Jetley, Ben Chelf. Diagnosing Medical Device Software Defects Using Static Analysis

Nowadays, when medicine employs complex devices for treating patients, software used in them must be secured from any defects and bugs. The paper concerns static analysis of such software systems. There are several sections that describe the essence of static analysis method, defect classes both common for software development on the whole and specific for medical devices, the task of choosing the best static code analysis tool and factors to consider while making this choice.

All the article reviews contain links to the source articles. We hope that our reviews will help you become more aware of the state of this sphere today.