MISRA-C

MISRA® (The Motor Industry Software Reliability Association) was established as a collaboration between various vendors in the automotive industry. The purpose is to promote best practice in developing safety-critical systems in road vehicles and other embedded systems.

MISRA®-C is a coding standard for the C programming language, developed by MISRA®. The purpose is to identify a subset of the C language that improve safety, portability and reliability.

In 1998, the first edition of the MISRA® standard (MISRA®-C:1998, titled "Guidelines for the use of the C language in vehicle based software") was released. MISRA®-C:1998 have 127 rules, of which 93 are required and 34 are advisory.

The MISRA®-C:1998 standard was quite targetted towards automotive systems, and in 2004, a second edition (MISRA®-C:2004, titled "Guidlines for the use of the C language in critical systems") was released.

MISRA®-C:2004 is more generic and better adapted for any type of embedded system, and have 141 rules of which 121 are required and 20 are advisory.

By following the MISRA®-C coding standard, you ensure that unsafe or unreliable coding constructs are not used in your software product, thus improving software quality. It is almost impossible to ensure MISRA®-C compliance without tool support.

Atollic TrueINSPECTOR® performs MISRA®-C:2004 checking, automatically verifying source code compliance, and points out any code lines that breaks any of the coding standard rules.

Atollic and Atollic TrueINSPECTOR are registered trademarks of Atollic AB. MISRA and "MISRA C" is a registered trademark of MIRA Ltd, held on behalf of the MISRA Consortium.