MISRA C rules in practice: what they are, why they exist and how to live with them
· 20 min read
Say "MISRA" in a room full of embedded developers and half of them will sigh, and the other half will ask which tool you use. The reputation of the rules is mixed: for some they are the bureaucracy that eats a week before every release, for others the reason why a car does not reboot on the highway. Both groups are partly right.
In this article I will go through the rules that I meet most often, one by one: what the rule asks for, what you get for it, what the bad code looks like, what the good code looks like and who finds the problem for you. All examples are real C code that I compiled and ran.