The largest and most interesting advertisement article (70 pages) about static code analysis

26 Oct 2011

Author: Andrey Karpov , Evgenii Ryzhkov

Of all the types of advertisement, only few of them are good for advertising programmer tools. Media advertising (television, radio, popular scientific issues) is too expensive (because you have to pay for presenting your ad to a potentially large audience or readership) and often misses the target (because there are very few programmers out of audience/readership). Advertising on specialized sites is often as inefficient, since, first, programmers instinctively skip ads and, second, they are aware of AdBlock. Another way is to make video guides on handling a program, but far not all the programs look bright and colorful to be interesting to watch videos about. Hence, it seems that the only way to tell the whole world about your product is to honestly and impartially show its good points by real examples.

Our task, while promoting the PVS-Studio code analyzer for C/C++/C++11, is to find software errors in well-known open source projects and describe them in our articles. By now we have collected a huge number of software errors detected in the coolest software projects. We found errors in Apache, Chromium, Clang, Miranda IM, Qt, TortoiseSVN, WinMerge and many others. We have gathered the most interesting errors in one place to make the largest advertisement article in the world.

The whole article consists of 70 pages, but only 10 of them are devoted to description of the static code analysis technology and our tool PVS-Studio. The rest 60 pages contain examples of errors (i.e. program code samples) with our comments. Any programmer, who at least has managed to look through it all, will get absolutely sure that the tool is worthy, and want to study it closely - because it is not praises of marketers that you will find in the article, but just samples of detected software errors which, as some believe, true programmers cannot make.

We understand that it's not an accepted practice to write an advertisement article of 70 pages, 85% of which are occupied by code samples and discussion of them. That's why we have managed to create THE MOST ORIGINAL AD OF A PROGRAMMER TOOL. Read the article about errors found by PVS-Studio and be terrified by finding out what errors there may be in the coolest software projects.

Read the largest article.