ABSTRACT

The incorrect behavior of some tools is less serious than the incorrect behavior of others. Most development tools are bought-in, rather than being produced within the company using them. For open-source tools, perhaps the largest overheads for using the tool are validating it and assigning an engineer to keep track of the bug reports, looking for bugs that may impact its safe use. Of all of the tools used to create the final product, the compiler poses the greatest challenge. The bugs that the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) tool found in the gcc compiler were in code constructions so complex that they would never have been written by a human programmer. Beta Component Incorporated (BCI) may wish to use the NPL tool to build a suitable level of confidence in its compiler. BCI is producing low-level operating system code, primarily using the C language.