Somehow, we’ve happened to check most of the libraries making up a collection called “Awesome hpp”. These are small header-only projects in C++. Hopefully, the information about the bugs we’ve found will help make the libraries better. We’ll also be happy to see the developers use PVS-Studio on a regular basis thanks to the free-license option we provide.

What follows is an overview of bugs found in the different libraries on the curated list of awesome header-only C++ libraries: awesome-hpp.

I learned about this list from the “Cross Platform Mobile Telephony” podcast. While we’re at it, I recommend that all C++ programmers check out CppCast. It is the first podcast for C++ developers by C++ developers!

Despite the large number of projects making up the list, bugs were few. There are three reasons for that:

• The projects are tiny. Many literally consist of just a header file.
• We decided to skip some of the projects as they were too troublesome to compile.
• Often, you can’t figure out whether template classes/functions have bugs in them until you have them instantiated. Consequently, many of the bugs can be detected only in a real project that makes an active use of a library. As for our analysis method, we simply included the headers into an empty .cpp file and ran the check, which drastically limited its effectiveness.

Even so, we’ve gathered enough warnings to write the article you are reading right now and a couple of additional ones.

A note for my teammates :). When I do something, I like to set and achieve a number of goals at once, and I urge you to follow my example. After learning about the awesome-hpp collection, I managed to accomplish the following useful tasks:

• set a task for our team to include into our test database a number of nice small modern projects based on the C++11, C++14, and C++17 standards;
• wrote the article “Why it is important to apply static analysis for open libraries that you add to your project”;
• wrote the article “Why code reviews are good, but not enough”;
• wrote this article;
• outlined a future post about argument evaluation order (see CSV Parser);
• figured out a way to find out which of my teammates read my posts carefully. If you have read this, drop by and get a prize – a chocolate bar or something like that :);
• demonstrated with this example how to accomplish several tasks.

#cpp #c++