Viva64 is a tool designed for software developers. With this tool, you can easily convert 32-bit applications to 64-bit ones.
At present, Viva64 and VivaMP software products are included in PVS-Studio as parts of it and are no longer distributed as separate applications. Please use PVS-Studio program to obtain the necessary possibilities of code verification.
Personal computers with 64-bit processors appeared on the market only at the beginning of 2006. Right after that, developers began to modify their applications to make them compatible with the new architecture. However, it suddenly turned out that applications could work incorrectly when running on new platforms. Standard means of diagnostics do not allow determining the new class of errors that occur in applications, and it is not good to leave those errors unfixed either.
The necessity to convert applications to 64-bit ones placed developers in a difficult situation. The behavior of applications that have worked for years without any problems has become unpredictable. Of course, there is more random access memory for applications, however, when working with greater amounts of data applications may hang, crash, or even they may generate useless files instead of the needed results.
One of possible solutions that can be used to search for errors when converting code is the use of special tools - static code analyzers. Viva64 is one of such tools. It is a code analyzer that finds potential errors in applications written in C and C++.
Viva64 is integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 as its extension module. Below is the appearance of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with Viva64 integrated into it.
Figure 1. The appearance of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with Viva64 integrated into it.
This allows developers to work with Viva64 in a familiar environment - there is no need to spend time on familiarizing with a new interface. Viva64 just adds a few new elements (in Fig.1 they are marked with red): the Viva64 menu item, a toolbar containing Viva64 commands and a window containing the list of found problems. Any developer can easily figure out how to work with Viva64.
Figure 2 demonstrates an example of Viva64 documentation. This is a description of one of the errors found by the code analyzer. The description is in the format that is compatible with the standard MSDN help system, and it can be automatically integrated into it. So, developers will not have to familiarize themselves with a new help system.
Figure 2 - A description of an error found by Viva64.
Viva64 allows you to:
I'd like to name the main competitors of Viva64, as well as similar means of analysis.
First of all, I'd like to note that Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 already includes a primitive tool that searches for possible conversion problems. However, this tool is not a Viva64 competitor, since it provides only preliminary code analysis. Viva64 provides a much higher level of code analysis and diagnostics.
Below is a list of tools that are similar to Viva64:
The above-mention products are code analyzers as well. Here is what makes Viva64 different:
In general, I can say that the use of Viva64 will allow you to greatly reduce the time needed to prepare 64-bit applications for the release. This happens because potentially dangerous code snippets are found automatically - there is no need to spend a lot of time searching for them manually.
Also, Viva64 brings your applications to a higher quality level. It's quite possible that developers can miss some errors when analyzing code manually. Viva64 allows you to avoid this.
