Re: Super Lint (was: Unexecutable Stack / Buffer Overflow Exploits...)

[Florian Weimer]

[e-mail]  (Kai Henningsen) writes:

> I guess what we _really_ need is some sort of super lint. That is, a  
> program that can analyze C code (others are fine, but C is the most  
> important by far) and highlights problematic points in the code.
> 
> And then there should be some sort of pseudo-comment which you can use to  
> explain properties of, say, pointed-to data, to possibly allow the super  
> lint to find out that the code is safe after all - except that somewhere  
> else, you violated those properties.

There is lclint---but it's not free software (you can't distribute it
`for commercial gain' without permission).  AFAIK, it's not that bad at
spotting coding errors.  OTOH, it requires quite a lot of pseudo-comments
in oder to work at all.  I don't think programmers will use it, though,
even if they are encouraged to do so by some kind of coding standard.
After all, people like to write obscure C code, especially if they know
that only a few dozen persons on earth are able to understand it. ;)