Patricia M. Hill

Roberto Bagnara, Abramo Bagnara, Patricia M. Hill

MISRA C is the most authoritative language subset for the C programming language that is a de facto standard in several industry sectors where safety and security are of paramount importance. While MISRA C is currently encoded in 175 guidelines (coding rules and directives), it does not coincide with them: proper adoption of MISRA C requires embracing its preventive approach (as opposed to the "bug finding" approach) and a documented development process where justifiable non-compliances are authorized and recorded as deviations. MISRA C guidelines are classified along several axes in the official MISRA documents. In this paper, we add to these an orthogonal classification that associates guidelines with their main rationale. The advantages of this new classification are illustrated for different kinds of projects, including those not (yet) having MISRA compliance among their objectives.

Roberto Bagnara, Michael Barr, Patricia M. Hill

The Barr Group's Embedded C Coding Standard (BARR-C:2018, which originates from the 2009 Netrino's Embedded C Coding Standard) is, for coding standards used by the embedded system industry, second only in popularity to MISRA C. However, the choice between MISRA C:2012 and BARR-C:2018 needs not be a hard decision since they are complementary in two quite different ways. On the one hand, BARR-C:2018 has removed all the incompatibilities with respect to MISRA C:2012 that were present in the previous edition (BARR-C:2013). As a result, disregarding programming style, BARR-C:2018 defines a subset of C that, while preventing a significant number of programming errors, is larger than the one defined by MISRA C:2012. On the other hand, concerning programming style, whereas MISRA C leaves this to individual organizations, BARR-C:2018 defines a programming style aimed primarily at minimizing programming errors. As a result, BARR-C:2018 can be seen as a first, dramatically useful step to C language subsetting that is suitable for all kinds of projects; critical projects can then evolve toward MISRA C:2012 compliance smoothly while maintaining the BARR-C programming style. In this paper, we introduce BARR-C:2018, we describe its relationship with MISRA C:2012, and we discuss the parallel and serial adoption of the two coding standards.

Roberto Bagnara, Abramo Bagnara, Alessandro Benedetti et al.

NPATH is a metric introduced by Brian A. Nejmeh in [13] that is aimed at overcoming some important limitations of McCabe's cyclomatic complexity. Despite the fact that the declared NPATH objective is to count the number of acyclic execution paths through a function, the definition given for the C language in [13] fails to do so even for very simple programs. We show that counting the number of acyclic paths in CFG is unfeasible in general. Then we define a new metric for C-like languages, called ACPATH, that allows to quickly compute a very good estimation of the number of acyclic execution paths through the given function. We show that, if the function body does not contain backward gotos and does not contain jumps into a loop from outside the loop, then such estimation is actually exact.