Static Analysis: An Introduction

Modern static-analysis tools provide powerful and specific insights into codebases. The Linux kernel team, for example, developed Coccinelle, a powerful tool for searching, analyzing, and rewriting C source code; because the Linux kernel contains more than 27 million lines of code, a static-analysis tool is essential both for finding bugs and for making automated changes across its many libraries and modules. Another tool targeted at the C family of languages is Clang scan-build, which comes with many useful analyses and provides an API for programmers to write their own analyses. Like so many things in computer science, the utility of static analysis is self-referential: To write reliable programs, we must also write programs for our programs. But this is no paradox. Static-analysis tools, complex though their theory and practice may be, are what will enable us, and engineers of the future, to overcome this challenge and yield the knowledge and insights that we practitioners deserve.