Les Hatton

The second edition of the MISRA C guidelines

A review of the latest version (October 2004) of the MISRA C guidelines. Discusses the background of such initiatives and compares the two versions of MISRA C.

When I first wrote this, I was full of hope that MISRA would actually help in improving the software quality of embedded control systems.

Now I have had more time to look at it, its a disaster. The rules do not make use of any measurement background and the latest version is bigger, more complicated, still ambiguous and much noisier in false positives to the point where its uninhibited enforcement may well make things worse in terms of injected defect. The people most likely to benefit unfortunately are the tool vendors.

http://www.leshatton.org/MISRA_comp_1105.html