GCC 11 Beefs Up Its Static Analyzer Capabilities

Added to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) last year was an integrated static analyzer via the "-fanalyzer" option for spotting potential code issues. For GCC 10 this integrated static analyzer operating off GCC's GIMPLE was in good shape for catching various bugs while for the upcoming GCC 11 it is now much more capable.

Ahead of the GCC 11 release coming up in two months or so, Red Hat's David Malcolm has blogged about the improvements he has made on the static analyzer for this annual GCC compiler update.

GCC 11's static analyzer functionality has seen several bug fixes including some design changes to address original defects in the analyzer. There are new warnings with GCC 11 around write to constants, writing to string literals, shift count negative, and shift count overflow -- on top of the more than dozen warnings already supported.

Malcolm has also been working on HTML output support to further enhance the experience looking at the static analyzer's output and other improvements.

More details on the GCC 11 static analyzer improvements and work that is still forthcoming can be found over on the Red Hat Developers blog.