Hi, I find very difficult to fix the dangling pointer bug occurred in my new open source office application developed in C++ language. I need some information to resolve this bug?
Coverity Prevent- static source code analysis tool Hi, Usually dangling pointers arises when an object is deleted or deallocated , without modifying the value of the pointer, so that the pointer still points to the memory location of the deallocated memory. As the system may reallocate the previously freed memory to another process, if the original program then dereferences the (now) dangling pointer, unpredictable behavior may result, as the memory may now contain completely different data. This is especially the case if the program writes data to memory pointed by a dangling pointer, as silent corruption of unrelated data may result, leading to subtle bugs that can be extremely difficult to find, or cause segmentation faults. You didn’t mention the code for resolving the bug. For resolving this bug easily you can use Coverity prevent, a Static analysis code inspection tool for resolving defects in C++,C or Java source code. Coverity has customers like Symbian, RIM (Blackberry), Juniper networks, Cisco, Texas instruments and is also used by the Department of Homeland security to scan lots of open source projects.
Re: Coverity Prevent- static source code analysis tool One useful trick for handling dangling pointers is to initialise a pointer to NULL (before it is set to point to something), e.g. instead of int *x;, use int *x=NULL; Then when it's no longer pointing at something set it back to NULL, e.g. instead of just "free(x);", use "free(x); x=NULL;". That way all pointers will be NULL or valid, and any access to a NULL pointer will result in an immediate segfault rather than the software thinking it's pointing at something valid and continuing regardless. Or you can use a smart pointer class, which handles all this for you.
