Any Tools to Catch Silly Mistakes in C Code?

Question

I had a nasty typo that wasted my time and my colleague's time, it was something like this:

for (i = 0; i < blah; i++); // <- I had a semi-colon here, that's the bug!
{
  // Some awesome logic here
}

First of all, it's very embarrassing, second thing, I should never repeat this. I'm relatively new to C. In Java, I guess I can use FindBugs to catch errors like these, what tool should I use for C code? Lint?

Answer 1

Yes, PC-Lint is probably the best tool available.

Answer 2

In addition to Lykathea's PC-Lint suggestion, you can also get better (or at least more) diagnostics if you bump up the warning level of the compiler. Something like /W4 or -Wall

Though I'm not sure if your particular problem would have been caught with this (MS VC doesn't seem to flag it even with all warnings enabled). I think that's because it's not an uncommon idiom for for loops to be empty when the work is done as side effects of the loop control expressions.

Answer 3

A few things that have saved me in the past, from the top of my head:

• Use if (3 == bla) rather than (bla == 3), because if you misspell and type (3 = bla) the compiler will complain.

• Use the all-warnings switch. Your compiler should warn you about empty statements like that.

• Use assertions when you can and program defensively. Put good effort into making your program fail early, you will see the weaknesses that way.

• Don't try to circumvent any safeguards the compiler or the OS have put in place. They are there for your ease of programming aswell.