Frequent questions and honest answers

• How to integrate PVS-Studio into an existing project and not drown in false positives?

  Use the mass suppression mechanism. PVS-Studio saves data about currently uninteresting errors to a special file. The analyzer will only issue warnings for new or recently changed code. As for the technical debt, you can tackle it later by fixing errors and tuning the analyzer step by step. Details.

• How can I use PVS-Studio for free?

  The following professionals can use PVS‑Studio for free:

  • Developers of open-source projects: request a license;
  • Developers of closed projects: one will have to add comments to code;
  • Security experts: see the relevant section in the article;
  • Microsoft MVP: write to us.

  To learn more about these options and choose the appropriate one for your project, please check out the review article: "Ways to Get a Free PVS‑Studio License".

  Students and professors can also use our analyzer for free. For this purpose, either adding comments in the code or running the analyzer on the Compiler Explorer site are suitable. More details are available here: Free PVS‑Studio for Students and Teachers.

• Where do I integrate the PVS-Studio analyzer?

  You can integrate the PVS‑Studio analyzer into popular build systems, IDEs, modern built-in systems, CIs and cloud CIs. Click here to see the entire list.

• Why doesn't PVS-Studio offer automatic fixes?

  Such replacement would be possible if PVS‑Studio analyzed coding style. But that's not what it is designed to do. Instead, PVS‑Studio's job is to detect bugs and potential vulnerabilities. In many cases, fixing them requires a creative approach and changing the program's behavior. Only the human developer can decide upon the appropriate way of fixing a given bug. More…

• How to quickly check out interesting warnings given by the PVS-Studio analyzer for C and C++ code?

  1. Disable all types of warnings except general ones (GA).
  2. Spend a little time disabling obviously irrelevant warnings and fighting against false positives related to macros.
  3. Start viewing warnings from Level 1. Only after it watch 2 and 3.

  More…

• How many false positives are there?

  Sadly, static analyzers are not perfect, which is why time from time you can get false positives. They are easy to suppress. For example, in the Visual Studio PVS‑Studio plugin, you need to click one button - “Mark As False Alarms” (see our video on how to suppress false positives). You can also report the problem to our support. If fix, the false alarm , you’ll see a decrease in false alarms after a PVS‑Studio update.

• Which platforms does PVS-Studio support?

  PVS-Studio supports Windows (64-bit and ARM), Linux (64-bit), and macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon). See the supported languages and compilers here.