Memory Error Detection Using GCC (Red Hat Developers blog)

Over at the Red Hat Developers blog, Martin Sebor looks at some new (or enhanced) warnings available in GCC 7 that will help catch various types of memory errors. For example: "The -Wformat-overflow=level option detects certain and likely buffer overflow in calls to the sprintf family of formatted output functions. The option starts by determining the size of the destination buffer, which can be allocated either statically or dynamically. It then iterates over directives in the format string, calculating the number of bytes each result in output. For integer directives like %i and %x it tries to determine either the exact value of the argument or its range of values and uses the result to calculate the exact or minimum and maximum number of bytes the directive can produce. Similarly for floating point directives such as %a and %f, and string directives such as %s. When it determines that the likely number of bytes a directive results in will not fit in the space remaining in the destination buffer it issues a warning."