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Yes, you've guessed correctly - the answer is "42". In this article you will find 42 recommendations about coding in C++ that can help a programmer avoid a lot of errors, save time and effort. The author is Andrey Karpov - technical director of "Program Verification Systems", a team of developers, working on PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Having checked a large number of open source projects, we have seen a large variety of ways to shoot yourself in the foot; there is definitely much to share with the readers. Every recommendation is given with a practical example, which proves the currentness of this question. These tips are intended for C/C++ programmers, but usually they are universal, and may be of interest for developers using other languages.

I find this question pretty strange. The answer is yes, of course, and that will be so for a long time. But I'm asked this question from time to time at conferences or when communicating with developers on forums. I've decided to answer this question in the form of a brief post so that I could just refer people to it in the future.

For the purpose of testing our C/C++ analyzer PVS-Studio, we often check various open-source projects and publish reports about bugs we have found. It is obvious that we seek projects of large sizes (hundreds of thousands of code lines), as there is little to be tested and caught in just a few dozens of files. We already had opportunities to test large collections consisting of hundreds of small open-source projects, for example sets of test samples for various SDKs and Frameworks. We are especially interested in checking such collections to see how the analyzer supports various specific code constructs, Visual C++ project subtypes, and so on.

In forums, people often say that 64-bit versions of programs consume a larger amount of memory and stack. Saying so, they usually argue that the sizes of data have become twice larger. But this statement is unfounded since the size of most types (char, short, int, float) in the C/C++ language remains the same on 64-bit systems. Of course, for instance, the size of a pointer has increased but far not all the data in a program consist of pointers. The reasons why the memory amount consumed by programs has increased are more complex. I decided to investigate this issue in detail.

We regularly check various open-source projects with PVS-Studio and send analysis results to developers and usually describe them in our posts as well. Besides, we add them into our bug database. This database is posted below on this page. The bugs are grouped according to the number of the diagnostic rule that is used to detect them. This number is given in the left column. Click on it to see the diagnostic rule description in the documentation. The right column contains a link to the corresponding error samples. Some diagnostics haven't detected any bugs in open-source projects yet. The lower you are in the list, the more diagnostics with no error samples there will be. The reason is simple: the later a certain rule had been added, the fewer projects were analyzed with this rule included into the rule set and therefore the fewer chances for it to demonstrate its capabilities.

Many programmers are very fond of blaming the compiler for different errors. Let's talk about it.

I decided to fool around a bit with the plugin and the picture to attract your attention. A whole lot of articles on programming regularly appear on the Internet, but most of them are unfortunately brief and all about nothing. But we are sure that our material is extremely useful, and it will be a pity if it remains unnoticed. We tell our users in every detail about how to develop plugins in C# for the Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010/2012 development environment. This material is based on our own experience and describes some subtleties you won't read anywhere about.

The article will familiarize application developers with tasks given them by the mass introduction of 64-bit multi-core processors symbolizing revolutionary increase of computing power available for an average user. It will also touch upon the problems of effective use of hardware resources for solving everyday applied tasks within the limits of Windows x64 operating system

My name is Andrey Karpov. I develop software for developers, and I'm fond of writing articles on code quality issues. In this connection, I have met the wonderful man Walter Bright who has created the D language. In the form of an interview, I will try to learn from him how the D language helps programmers get rid of errors we all make when writing code.

PVS-Studio 5.00: support of Embarcadero C++Builder, Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 applications in Visual Studio, and several hundreds of diagnostic rules

This post is about love. About the love of the static code analyzer PVS-Studio, for the great open source Linux operating system. This love is young, touching and fragile. It needs help and care. You will help greatly if you volunteer to help testing the beta-version of PVS-Studio for Linux.

As an experiment, we have decided to offer everyone interested a PVS-Studio registration key for 5 days to study its 64-bit diagnostics more thoroughly. The PVS-Studio demo version is absolutely full-function. It is sufficient to study the tool and get familiar with its capabilities. The user has up to 200 clicks to navigate through code fragments the analyzer considers to be probably incorrect. We believe it's quite enough for the user to decide if he/she likes the tool or not. However, that might be insufficient in case you are searching for 64-bit errors. Many of the 64-bit warnings are false positives or are irrelevant to this program, as fragments they point to cannot cause errors. That's why the restriction of 200 messages you can click to navigate through the code may prevent you from forming a definite opinion of the tool. We have been watching an increasing interest towards development of 64-bit software lately. Perhaps this has to do with the release of Embarcadero RAD Studio XE3 Update 1 that has learned now to compile 64-bit applications. Or maybe it's just that the time has come.

PVS-Studio is a static analyzer that detects errors in source code of C/C++/C++11 applications. The PVS-Studio tool integrates into the Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 environment.

We have a practice of occasionally re-analyzing projects we have already checked with PVS-Studio. There are several reasons why we do so. For example, we want to know if we have managed to eliminate false positives for certain diagnostics. But the most interesting thing is to see how new diagnostic rules work and what errors they can find. It is very interesting to watch the tool catch more and more new defects in a project that seems to be cleaned out already. The next project we have re-checked is Clang.

Creating extension packages (plug-ins) for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE appears as quite an easy task at the first sight. There exist an excellent MSDN documentation, as well as various articles, examples and a lot of other additional sources on this topic. But, at the same time, it could also appear as a difficult task when an unexpected behavior is encountered along the way. Although it can be said that such issues are quite common to any programming task, the subject of IDE plug-in development is still not thoroughly covered at this moment. Part1