Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

`RULE-11-9`: Consider more types of assignment

Open
#671 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
cpp
Domain
devtools

Research direction

No implementation files or tests are named. Start by locating the RULE-11-9 query and tracing how assignment is represented, then compare it with the four assignment operations listed in the issue. Done when the rule’s coverage of those operations is defined and validated, including any affected rules.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Difficulty-Low false positive/false negative Impact-Medium Standard-MISRA-C
Affected rules
  • RULE-11-9
Description

Rule 11.9 prohibits the use of 0 as a null pointer constant when assigning to a pointer. However, we do not capture all the types of assignments. The Glossary (Appendix J) states:

Assigned

An expression is assigned if it is the subject of an assignment.

Assignment

It is sometimes convenient to use the term assignment to denote any operation which takes place as if it were by assignment. The operations covered by this term are:
• Assignment by means of one of the assignment operators;
• Passing an argument to a function, in which case the argument is copied as if by assignment to the corresponding parameter;
• Returning an expression from a function, in which case the result is copied as if by assignment to an object with the function’s return type;
• Using an expression to initialize all or part of an object, including a compound literal in C99, in which case the expression is copied as if by assignment to the destination.

This may also impact other MISRA rules that refer to the term assignment or assigned.

Example
void* myfunc() {
  return 0; // NON_COMPLIANT
}
Dominant language
CodeQL
Stars
227
Forks
82
Avg merge
6d 7h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from github/codeql-coding-standards

All issues in github/codeql-coding-standards

Similar issues

More DevTools issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.