About us

We want Cppcheck to be a tool which you actually want to use, which you can count on to improve your code, and which gives you more time to develop instead of tracking bugs.

Our goal is for Cppcheck to be

• the best tool for finding coding constructs with undefined behavior,
• to generate zero false positives, and
• be the simplest tool to install and use.

Cppcheck Solutions is committed to contribute to and grow the open-source community and ensure that the open-source version will continue to be free and available for everyone to use.

The history of Cppcheck

In 2007, Daniel Marjamäki was working as a software developer developing safety critical embedded software. At the time, the static analysis tools available for the compiler used was focused more on
“how the code looked” than “how it worked”. Specifically, identifying undefined behavior was overlooked and the checkers often generated false positives.

This was problematic as bugs emanating from undefined behavior are notoriously difficult to track down and are also one of the main attack vectors when systems are hacked. A large number of false positives on the other hand teaches programmers that the tool can’t be trusted and that whatever it finds is probably not a problem anyway and can be ignored.

Daniel decided to write his own tool with an explicit focus on undefined behavior and no false positives. He called the tool Cppcheck and it was released as open-source under the GPL license.

Today, the open-source version of Cppcheck is one of the top 10 most used static analysis tools in the world with tens of thousands of downloads each month.