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by fweimer 845 days ago
The commercial static analyzers I've seen generate false positives (bogus issues that just aren't there) and false negatives (e.g., unconditional out of bounds pointer writes if that particular piece of C code is ever executed). Some of that comes with the territory because commonly used languages and their libraries are underspecified and commonly used at the boundaries of what is specified. And these tools must always produce some result even if they cannot even parse (or see) the entire code base.

Usually, when people say “static analysis“ they accept unsoundness and use of heuristics. Otherwise, they call the tool a type checker or a verifier. Such tools may run into the theoretical issues you mentioned. For them, the solution is to change the program until it compiles in a reasonable amount of time.