Re: Splint

[Ken Raeburn]

On Jan 8, 2010, at 08:17, Richard Stallman wrote:
>    While Coverity's stuff is commercial,
>
> Do you mean "proprietary"?  They are not the same.  There is nothing
> wrong with a program's being commercial.  See
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.

Yes, sorry, I mis-spoke.

>                                           they've offered its use to some
>    open-source/free software projects.
>
> See http://www.gnu.org//philosophy/mcvoy.html
> for the story about another similar offer,
> and the harm that was done when someone else accepted it.

Yep, there is that issue.  At least in this case it is still practical  
and easy for someone to use splint and other free or at least open- 
source software, while someone else uses something like Coverity's  
tools.  Unlike Bitkeeper and Linux kernel source access, the  
proprietary tools shouldn't intrude significantly on those who don't  
want to use it in their development work.

I'd still love to see a free tool to do this work.  But when I did a  
survey for work a few years back, my impression was that the free  
tools were all poor; splint appeared to be one of the best of the lot,  
and was quite a pain to try to use.  Perhaps with recent work on gcc,  
llvm and other tools, the situation can be changed.

Ken