static code analysis (revisited)

A while ago I was extolling the virtues of static analysis tools such as cppcheck, smatch and CoverityScan for C and C++ projects.  I've recently added to this armoury the clang analyser scan-build, which has been most helpful in finding even more obscure bugs that the previous three did not catch.

Using scan-build is very simple indeed, install clang and then in your source tree just build your project with scan-build, e.g. for a project built by make, use:

scan-build make

..and at the end of a build one will see a summary message:

scan-build make
scan-build: 366 bugs found.
scan-build: Run 'scan-view /tmp/scan-build-2015-09-08-094505-16657-1' 
to examine bug reports.
scan-build: The analyzer encountered problems on some source files.
scan-build: Preprocessed versions of these sources were deposited in 
'/tmp/scan-build-2015-09-08-094505-16657-1/failures'.
scan-build: Please consider submitting a bug report using these files:
scan-build:   http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/filing_bugs.html

..and running scan-view will show the issues found.  For an example of the kind of results scan-build can find, I ran it against a systemd build (head commit 4df0514d299e349ce1d0649209155b9e83a23539). 

As one can see, scan-build is a powerful and easy to use open-source static analyser.  I heartily recommend using it on every C and C++ project.