#cppcat

One odd year ago, we decided to carry out an experiment and release a tool for small teams and single developers as an alternative to the PVS-Studio static code analyzer. This is how a very inexpensive analyzer CppCat was born. Now we can sum up the results of that experiment and admit that it has failed. During its short lifetime, this project has brought us almost as much money as we had put into its development, promotion, and maintenance. Thus, the project has proved unprofitable. And we could have spent all that time (the most valuable resource) on improving PVS-Studio instead, couldn't we? So we have to close down the CppCat project and focus on PVS-Studio. I hope you will find it interesting to learn from someone else's experience of launching a new business idea, for negative experience is still experience.

So how does this affect our products PVS-Studio and CppCat?

Why Students Need the CppCat Code Analyzer

It occurred to me recently to reanalyze the Newton Game Dynamics physics engine. The project's code is very high-quality, so there were almost no genuine bugs detected, but I did get a few dozens of false positives. Seems like there's nothing to write about, doesn't it? Well, I thought I should write about how to handle false positives and how to avoid them. I found the Newton Game Dynamics project a good example to demonstrate that on.

I have checked the OpenMW project by CppCat and written this tiny article

Tesseract is a free software program for text recognition developed by Google. According to the project description, "Tesseract is probably the most accurate open source OCR engine available". And what if we try to catch some bugs there with the help of the CppCat analyzer?

We have carried out a thorough comparison of four analyzers for C/C++ code: CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio and Visual Studio's built-in analyzer. It is a serious, large investigation that we had spent about 170 man-hours on and which, in our opinion, gives a good idea of the general state of things in static analysis nowadays.

The developers of PVS-Studio analyzer regularly publish new articles about their tool (and sometimes about other analyzers as well) where they share the analysis results of various software projects produced by the analyzer and demonstrate code samples in which defects were found