PC-Lint and Visual Lint

Writing software is always a challenge. When you are responsible for every line of code across multiple products and platforms, it is critical to write solid code that is as good as possible (bugs are very expensive to deal with!) :)

The free lint tools (mainly cppcheck) are OK but seem to miss lots of things compared to the professional tools, and I've been meaning to get a proper static code analysis tool for a long time now...

So: I finally took the plunge a couple of days ago, and bought a license for PC-Lint. I'd been meaning to do this for a long time, having slowly been improving my tool chain. The longer I do programming, the more I realise that it is critical to have as good a set of tools as possible, from operating system, editor, IDE, shell/scripting tools etc. ...!

Having installed PC-Lint and started to use it... I soon realise how difficult it was to use, albeit very powerful. I have never seen a tool with so many command line options, and stepping from command line output to change the code (and back again) is very difficult. So, imagine my complete relief to stumble upon Visual Lint!

For those who don't know, Visual Lint it is a GUI front-end for PC-Lint that makes it a piece of cake to use; it integrates beautifully with Visual Studio.

One thing I like about the evaluation version of Visual Lint is that it makes it very easy for you to see which features you need, so you can end-up choosing the product variant that best meets your needs. I'm guessing I'll get the Professional Edition, and am still making my mind up; but I'm certain to get a copy in a few days.

It is a shame that PC-Lint doesn't have an evaluation model. The software is certainly expensive; which is understandable, but a shame as it prevents more people improving the quality of their code.

If only there were an integrated Static Code Analysis system for XCode on Mac. It seems that the availability of PC-Lint and Visual Lint gives a major advantage to Visual Studio on Windows for cross-platform coding, as much as I love the general speed of working on the Mac. I guess I'll continue to work on the Mac, but spend a little more time now on Windows analysing the cross-platform code I've written using Visual Lint.