MISRA C enforcement in the Safer C Toolset
The Safer C toolset
goes to considerable effort to enforce the well-known MISRA C standard.
The MISRA C standard was developed by a consortium of car manufacturers
with the intention of introducing the notion of safer language subsets
for programmable control systems in the auto industry.
It has been very
successful and is now used in other industries also in which safety
plays a part.
Several things must
be born in mind when considering standards conformance:
- Very few standards
can be fully enforced automatically. There is nearly always an element
of subjectivity in even the best of standards. In some standards,
it is far more than element with the average automatic enforceability
being only around 30-40%, (Hatton (1995)).
Such standards are characterised by somewhat vague rules such as "comments
shall be meaningful". The MISRA C standard enjoys much higher
levels of enforceability because the rules are based on safer subsets
and are in the majority clearly written. The diagram below shows the
theoretical enforceability of the MISRA C standard.
- The second thing
to consider is how well particular tools enforce that part of the
standard which is enforceable. The following diagram illustrates the
degree to which the Safer C toolset can enforce the MISRA C standard.
As can be seen, the required rules which can be enforced are almost
100% enforced.
For more about
MISRA, see here.
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