Microsoft pondering code-checker releases
InfoWorld | at | by Mike
Microsoft is considering making commercially available advanced code-checking tools used mostly by in-house developers thus far. The tools have been under the purview of the Microsoft's Programmer Productivity Research Center. The center has tools for static analysis to examine static source text and patterns that indicate errors. Tools for dynamic analysis, which observe for program errors while the program is running, also have been a focus, said Thomas Ball, senior researcher with Microsoft's research group.
Static analysis tools that may be released commercially include Prefix, which features a toolkit to analyze source text for common errors. "It does a very sort of deep semantic analysis," finding errors such as memory leaks, corruption of memory, and null pointer references, said Ball.