Analysis Tools to help you in C development

Question

I've just started learning C and I have a hard time finding bugs, memory leaks and the like. Which are good tools to assist you in finding such things? I heard of Valgrind but are there others?

Answer 1

For me (on Linux) there are:

• GDB used to find bugs
• Valgrind find memory leaks

Answer 2

If you're allocating memory dynamically your programs are probably already too complex for it to do a really good job, but you may be amused by the value analysis in Frama-C. Take a look at the tutorialet and move up to the tutorial chapter in the manual if you are still interested.

Answer 3

lint is the classic C static analysis tool.

Answer 4

I suspect they cost more than you’re willing to pay, but both Coverity and Klocwork do serious checking for memory leaks, along with lots of other things.