Chip Shortage Calls for Flexible Static Analysis Tools
Analysts say that the global shortage of computer chips may last until the end of 2022. In the words of Simon Segars, Arm Holdings chief executive
"This isn't a short-term problem with a short-term solution."
While all industries have been affected, the automotive industry has been particularly hard hit: one estimate puts to 7.7 million the number of vehicles whose production has been blocked in 2021 due to chip shortage.
While the semiconductor industry is working hard at overcoming the current difficulties, in the near term the only available mitigation is flexibility.
One consequence is that industries that have traditionally been rather conservative in the choice of microcontrollers and associated toolchains, now find themselves in the position of working with different microcontrollers and toolchains, and changing them quite frequently and at relatively short notice.
Changing the toolchain, and the compiler in particular, has far reaching consequences on static analysis. All versions of C and C++ have numerous implementation-defined behaviors (e.g., there are 112 such behaviors in C99). These involve many aspects of the language, including several that easily escape attention.
Want to know everything about implementation-defined behavior in C and C++?
Most static analysis tools on the market leave it to you to configure the tool to adapt it to the implementation-defined aspects of the used toolchain with the current set of options.
Most static analysis tools leave such an error prone task to you, but not all. ECLAIR will automatically infer the implementation-defined aspects of the language implemented by the used toolchain with the used compiler options, and this for each translation unit, in a way that is completely transparent to the user. Switching toolchain will not be a problem and you will not have to worry about that: ECLAIR will just do the right thing for you.
Want to see an example of ECLAIR doing precisely that?
If you would like to book an exclusive demo of the tool with our ECLAIR Experts drop us an email and let us know your availability. In these calls we go through your main requirements and show you the best ECLAIR solution for your specific use case.
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