C and C++ run the embedded world: firmware, engine controllers, medical devices, industrial automation, network equipment, operating systems, and the performance-critical core of most large software products. When one of those products ends up in litigation, the evidence is C or C++ source code, and the review team has to actually live in that world to read it correctly.
The short version: C and C++ dominate safety-critical and embedded litigation: product liability, patent infringement, copyright, and trade secret cases alike. Reviewing them well requires engineers fluent in memory management, concurrency, and real-time behavior, because the defects and design choices that decide these cases live exactly there.
Where C and C++ cases come from
Most software product liability matters involve C, because C is what runs on the metal. Unintended behavior in a vehicle, an infusion pump, or an industrial controller traces to firmware, and firmware means C with occasional assembly. Patent cases reach C and C++ whenever the claims cover how a device actually works: task scheduling, signal processing, memory handling, protocol implementations. Copyright and trade secret disputes follow the language's commercial footprint, from competing device makers to departed engineering teams.
What a litigation-grade C/C++ review looks for
- Memory safety. Buffer overflows, use-after-free, uninitialized data, and stack exhaustion: the classic C defect classes that become liability evidence.
- Concurrency and real-time behavior. Race conditions, deadlocks, priority inversion, and interrupt handling, which no line-by-line reading catches without real embedded experience.
- Coding standard compliance. Whether the code follows MISRA C or a comparable standard is often evidence bearing on the standard of care.
- Claim mapping. Tracing each limitation of an asserted patent claim to specific functions, data structures, and call paths.
- Provenance. Version control history, copied fragments, and whether the produced source actually matches the shipping binary.
The most consequential C source code review in litigation history, the examination of Toyota's engine control software in the unintended acceleration cases, turned on precisely these issues: task death, stack overflow, and the real-time behavior of hundreds of thousands of lines of C. Our co-founder Michael Barr delivered that analysis to an Oklahoma jury.
The right reviewers
Our source code review experts for C and C++ matters are embedded and systems engineers who have shipped production code in these languages, not generalists reading unfamiliar syntax. We match the reviewer to the technology at issue, whether that is an RTOS-based controller, a Linux kernel module, or a large C++ application, and every review follows the documented, protective-order-compliant discipline described in our source code review services and our guide to vetting a code review team.