Case Study: Riverblade achieves 17x faster PC‑lint C++ code analysis with Incredibuild

Accelerating PC-lint C++ code analysis to complete the static analysis of a Visual Studio solution in a fraction of the time

Riverblade, a UK ISV and creator of Visual Lint (which integrates the PC‑lint C++ analyzer into Visual Studio), faced very long static analysis runs—often taking hours—because PC‑lint processes large Windows SDK headers and deep internal dependencies. To avoid costly hardware upgrades or intrusive code changes, Riverblade evaluated and adopted Incredibuild to distribute PC‑lint work across multiple networked developer machines.

Using Incredibuild’s XML extensibility interface, Riverblade enabled Visual Lint to delegate PC‑lint tasks to spare agents; with six machines (four dual‑core and two quad‑core) a full analysis fell from roughly 4 hours to just over 15 minutes — about a 17× speedup. The Incredibuild integration delivered low‑cost grid scaling, visual progress monitoring via the Build Monitor, and much faster detection and correction of regressions.

Riverblade

Anna-Jayne Metcalfe

Founder