Customer Reviews

Writing Bug-Free C Code for Windows: A Programming Style That Automatically Detects Bugs in C Code (Prentice Hall Series on Programming Tools and M)

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I worked with Jerry for some time when I consulted to Datametrics in 1993-94. (His boss, John Kelly, used to poo-poo the entire performance management space in which Datametrics operated, but--as he astutetly pointed out--why not remain quiet in front of the audiences and just keep pocketing the $20K per week if the software made them happy.) Jerry's profound arrogance (remarkably, almost as intolerable as mine--even though he was about fifteen years junior to me technically) aside, he describes some clever techniques. Most are built upon a coding paradigm that hides, rather than shares, header information and avails itself of some nifty preprocessor tricks that rely upon string representations of type information to "detect" type collisions and incompatibilities. Of course, Jerry takes the wind out of his own sails right up front by (a) boring the reader to tears with Microsoft-style programming tricks, like the old swap-the-two-ints-via-XOR and the even older redraw-the-window-region-minimizing-copies--and his revelation that 9/20 is the same as 0.35 (or something like that) drew some earnest diaphragmatic guffaws. But if you can get through the insufferable veneer, there are some very good techniques to be squirreled out of it. Not only that, but Jerry's assertion (dare we believe him?) that he was able to build a 250K LOC application "without bugs" (well, one that readily generates detailed stack traces when a bug occurs) by closely adhering to his gospel is almost credible.