Source-code analysis tools company GrammaTech has announced CodeSonar 3.8, promising faster code analysis with fewer false positives. The current speed boost has been achieved by parallelizing the software's analysis engine to take full advantage of multi-core processors.

"The improvement is dramatic, especially for large projects. For example, on an 8-core machine, we have seen analysis times reduced by 85 percent," said Paul Anderson, VP of engineering at GrammaTech.

NOTE: CodeSonar is a static-analysis tool that performs a whole-program, interprocedural analysis on C/C++ code, and identifies complex programming bugs that can result in system crashes, memory corruption, concurrency errors, and other serious problems.

The company now claims to be able to produce a lower false positive rate due to a combination of new models for C/C++ libraries (e.g. Boost) and improvements to the analysis itself. Workflow enhancements have been incorporated to make it easier for developers to manage defect warnings across multiple project versions and development branches — and there is also better checking for concurrency-related errors.

This release is the first version to incorporate CodeSonar's software architecture visualization, which is designed to provide developers with insight into the relationships between elements in software and scales to large projects with millions of lines of source code.

"Fluid transitions allow developers to visualize massive data sets in real time and to see the program at different levels of abstraction. CodeSonar visualization also includes other program-understanding and navigation features, and supports annotations and sharing of diagrams between team members," said Anderson.