We have carried out a thorough comparison of four analyzers for C/C++ code: CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio and Visual Studio's built-in analyzer. It is a serious, large investigation that we had spent about 170 man-hours on and which, in our opinion, gives a good idea of the general state of things in static analysis nowadays.

1. Comparison of static code analyzers:
CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio and Visual
Studio
Author: Evgeniy Ryzhkov, Andrey Karpov, Paul Eremeev, Svyatoslav Razmyslov
Date: 12.03.2014
We have carried out a thorough comparison of four analyzers for C/C++ code: CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio
and Visual Studio's built-in analyzer. It is a serious, large investigation that we had spent about
170 man-hours on and which, in our opinion, gives a good idea of the general state of things in static
analysis nowadays.
About the comparison
We picked out over ten open-source test projects for the investigation.
Each analyzer was used with the recommended settings of severity levels of diagnostic messages:
• CppCat: all diagnostics enabled (no severity levels);
• Cppcheck: Errors and Warnings;
• PVS-Studio: the 1-st and 2-nd level of general diagnostics;
• Visual Studio: Microsoft Native Recommended Rules.
We closely studied the analysis reports and picked out those warnings which seemed to indicate
genuine bugs or code fragments which at least required close examination. The summarized results are
presented in this article.
The comparison methodology is described in detail in the article: "How we compared code analyzers:
CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio and Visual Studio". In that article, you will also find the list of the test
projects, the list of the diagnostic messages we picked out, examples of detected bugs and so on. You
will also learn from that article why we didn't provide the information about the number of false
positives.
Comparison results
The results of the comparison of the analyzers CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio and Visual Studio's built-in
analyzer are presented in three tables:

2. Table 1 - The number of detected genuine bugs (numerical form)
Table 2 - The number of detected genuine bugs (percentage form)
Table 3 - Analysis time (in minutes)
Analysis time
We don't think analysis time to be a significant comparison metric. But people often wonder about our
tools' performance, so we decided to include these figures into the article.
As you can see, Cppcheck is the fastest analyzer. But notice also that the table shows the total analysis
time. On some projects, Cppcheck was running slower than the other analyzers. So the actual analysis
speed rather depends on a particular project.
CppCat is actually a bit faster than PVS-Studio as it has fewer diagnostic rules to check. But the
difference is really insignificant (a few dozens of seconds), so we found it pointless to show it in the
table.
Diagnostics
Our team has selected a total of 965 unique code fragments that require investigation and fixing.
As you can see from the table, CppCat and PVS-Studio have shown identical results. The reason is that
the PVS-Studio analyzer with recommended settings uses the same set of diagnostics as CppCat.
The total number of defects detected by the analyzers is 742 for CppCat and PVS-Studio each; 193 for
Cppcheck; 116 for Visual Studio.
Thus, CppCat and PVS-Studio detect 4 times more errors than Cppcheck and 6 times more errors than
Visual Studio's built-in analyzer.
Conclusion
The CppCat and PVS-Studio analyzers have proved to be evident leaders in the number of revealed
genuine and potential defects.

3. References
1. Evgeniy Ryzhkov, Andrey Karpov, Paul Eremeev, Svyatoslav Razmyslov. "How we compared code
analyzers: CppCat, Cppcheck, PVS-Studio and Visual Studio".