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BatmanAoD@programming.dev 9 months agoYou are making an extreme and completely absurd assumption, and it also sounds like you’ve misread what I wrote. The “attempts” I’m talking about are studies (formal and informal) to measure the root causes of bugs, not the C or C++ projects themselves.
I cited one specific measurement, Daniel Stenberg’s analysis of the Curl codebase. Here’s a separate post about the testing and static analysis used for Curl.
Here’s a post with a list of other studies. The projects analyzed are:
- Android (both the full codebase and the Bluetooth & media components)
- iOS & MacOS
- Chrome
- Microsoft (this is probably the most commonly cited one)
- Firefox
- Ubuntu Linux
Do you really think that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and the Ubuntu project “don’t even consider onboarding basic static analysis tools” in their C and C++ projects?
If you’re curious about the specifics of how errors slip through anyway, here’s a talk from CppCon 2017 about how Facebook, despite copious investment into static analysis, still had “curiously recurring” C++ errors. It’s long, but I think it’s worthwhile; the most interesting part to me, though, starts around 29:40, where he asks an audience of C++ users whether some specific code compiles, and only about 10% of them get the right answer, one of whom is an editor of the C++ standard.