

CppCat, an Ambitious C++ Code Analyzer from Tula - AndreyKarpov
http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0232/

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gizmo
Developers are a notoriously bad group to sell software to, and this
interviews only confirms that once again. The authors feel they have to
apologize for the price €5250 for a team of 9 developers. 9 office chairs cost
more than that! Then the interviewer follows up with "such a high price, are
there really any customers?" Geez.

With specialized products like these you need to find your exact target
audience. If your audience is small then you need to deliver tons and tons of
value.

Back of the envelope, you have to reach 1000 new customers a year at €5000
each in order to pay for development, an office, and all other overhead.
Difficult, but not impossible. There still are tons of C++ shops out there.

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sehugg
One group that _should_ be willing to pay for it are those writing high-
reliability and safety-critical code, e.g. DoD. It appears they have less of a
preference for Ada nowadays, instead using a "safer" subset of C++ and static
analysis tools.

~~~
pjmlp
The problem is that in the early days Ada compilers were more expensive than C
and C++ static analysis tools. :(

Nowadays we have cheaper options, but the harm is done.

However, from what I can infer from last years of FOSDEM, at least in Europe,
Ada use seems to be slowly rising.

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timtadh
This was a great interview about selling a very complex product to a very
difficult customer base (programmers). Someday, I want to start a developer
tools company so it was cool to hear about the challenges they faced in
getting started. My key take points were:

1\. Your tool must demonstrably solve a challenging problem right away.
Programmers will ignore it if on first run it doesn't have a good result for
them.

2\. Marketing via finding bugs in FOSS software can help sell licenses.

3\. Mindshare is difficult to build because your target is often big companies
with big budgets, but the people you need to convince are everyday
programmers. Hopefully, their new lower priced option will help them in this
case.

Anyway, very cool bootstrapped business. It is always nice to read about
someone who has been able to make a business out of solving hard problems.
Many businesses seem to solve easy problems which people haven't noticed
before (which is likely a better business strategy but can sometimes lead to
boring work).

~~~
AndreyKarpov
Thanks for the comment.

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kev009
Love this: "Ours is a most typical software company: we create software
products and sell them to customers. In this sense, we are not quite "in the
trend": we don't design mobile applications with millions of installs, or
possess a website with hundreds of thousands of unique visitors. We run a, so
to say, classic business which seems to be pretty rare nowadays."

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huhtenberg
Woah!

I've been sitting on a need for MSVC static analyzer for years. I looked at
PVS-Studio (prompted by that exact Carmack's plug mentioned in the interview),
but the multi-$K price was a non-starter. Static analysis has always been a
secondary need in our case, a "nice to have" thing, which is now very easy to
justify with $250 price tag. Thanks, guys!

(edit) Ha, it is $250 _per year_. Interesting. Aside from an initial gut
rejection, this is actually not a big deal. 10 years worth of a license is
still $2500.

~~~
cjensen
Visual Studio 2013 has a static analyzer.

A "good enough" solution that comes free kills all possibility that a second
company can make a living by selling an cheap solution.

~~~
AndreyKarpov
> A "good enough" solution

Comparing static analysis in Visual Studio 2012 (Visual C++ 2012) and PVS-
Studio - [http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0151/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0151/)

It's old comparison. Soon there will be an article about the comparison of the
new PVS-Studio and Visual Studio 2013. PVS-Studio is much more better.

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codex
Any chance of Linux support? How does it compare with Coverity, Clang
Analyzer, PREfast, Klocwork et al?

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AndreyKarpov
The answer can be found here: PVS-Studio and CppCat: An Interview with Andrey
Karpov, the Project CTO and Developer -
[http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0231/](http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0231/)

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vladtaltos
if they support linux, I'd license it without any thought. $250/year is pretty
cheap...

~~~
jerryr
Agreed. I'd love a command-line version for both Mac and Linux that I can use
for embedded C work. $250/year for this would be a no-brainer.

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AndreyKarpov
P.S. Ask everyone who like CppCat to leave a review here:
[http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8edc3425-8e8e-...](http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8edc3425-8e8e-4376-b660-fe0c81f9bdd3?SRC=Home)

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laichzeit0
I can't help but feeling like you need guys would need an American sales team
to sell your stuff in America. Or is corporate America pretty okay dealing
with "commies"/Russians these days? (I mean no disrespect)

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APNSoft
Thanks for the new program. It is we were looking for....

