Our support chats and some other indirect signs showed that there are many students among our free users. Here’s the reason: PVS-Studio is now more often used by professors in courses related to software development. We are very pleased with this, and we decided to write this small article for teachers to try to contribute to this trend.

Development of modern software is impossible without an integrated approach for ensuring software quality and reliability. The reason is that the size of the codebase of today’s applications is growing rapidly. Let numbers speak for themselves. For example, take these operating systems:

• MS-DOS 1.0: 4,000 lines of code. One person could read this code entirety, sort it out, and find bugs.
• Linux 1.0.0 kernel: 176,000 lines of code. A team still might thoroughly review the code, although it would take a lot of time and effort.
• Linux 5.0 kernel: more than 26,000,000 lines of code. One just can’t embrace such a boundless project.

The Linux kernel example shows that the standard codebase size has grown 150 times in the past 25 years. Now it is impossible for a programmer to review the code of the entire application, understand it, find errors, and improve architectural solutions in one sitting. The inner workings of modern programs can be too overwhelming for one person.

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