Checking the source with the Clang Static Analyzer
The Clang Static Analyzer is a tool that performs additional checking on C, C++, and Objective C source code. The checks performed by the static analyzer are more thorough than the checks the compiler performs. They are also more costly in terms of time and required resources. The static analyzer has a set of checkers that check for certain bugs.
The tool performs a symbolic interpretation of the source code that looks at all the code paths through an application and derives constraints on the values used in the application from it. Symbolic interpretation is a common technique used in compilers, for example, to identify constant values. In the context of the static analyzer, the checkers are applied to the derived values.
For example, if the divisor of a division is 0, then the static analyzer warns about it. We can check this with the following example stored in the div.c file:
int divbyzero(int a, int b) { return a / b...
