Cppcheck 1.51 Analysis Tool for C/C++ Code

Cppcheck is a static analysis tool for C/C++ code. Cppcheck does not detect syntax errors like C/C++ compilers but tries to detect bugs that are not visible by the compiler like memory leaks or out of bounds.

Cppcheck is a command line tool but don’t panic, a GUI is also available. With Cppcheck, you can analyze a single file or the content of a whole folder.

Links:

• Cppcheck hompage
• Cppcheck manual
• Cppcheck 1.50 Win32 installer
• Cppcheck 1.51 source code

Cppcheck 1.51 changelog:

• New checks:
  • actual initialization order of member variables is not the same as the written order. Use –inconclusive and –enable=style to enable this check.
  • when first comparison is true, the 2nd comparison is always true. Example: ‘(x>5 && x!=1)’. Use –enable=style to enable this check.
• we fixed many false positives and false negatives in existing checks.

I tested Cppcheck with this piece of code:

bool f(int x)
{
  int i;
  if (x == 0)
  {
    i = 0;
    return false;
  }
  return true;
}

char* createT()
  { return new char[100]; }

void destroyT(void* p)
  { free(p); }

void s(int x)
{
    char* f = createT();
    if (x == 1)
        return;
    destroyT(f);
}

int main()
{
  char a[10];
  char b[20];
  a[10] = 0;
  strcpy(a, b, 25);
  for (int i=0; i<20; i++)
    b[i] = a[i];
  return 0;
}

And here are the errors detected by the tool: