Does InstantC find errors that a tool such as PC-Lint might miss?
Yes, quite often. We are trying to solve some of the same problems as PC-Lint, helping to find bugs while looking at all of the files in a program, but are using a different strategy: PC-Lint does static analysis, and tries to warn you about everything that *might* be a problem. Although some folks are disciplined enough to use PC-Lint after every compile, and therefore have ‘lint-free’ code, many people are overwhelmed by the number of messages. InstantC’s strategy is to only report things that are for certain errors, or which you have asked for, such as requiring prototypes. While InstantC uses static analysis, like lint, InstantC also includes run-time checking, which can catch value-dependent bugs, such as the typical off-by-one error in referencing C arrays. No product will find *all* the bugs in your code. Since InstantC and PC-Lint use different strategies, they will find different subsets of all the bugs in your code. PC-Lint does a particularly fine job of static analysis, unm
