Compare Splint vs. ZeroPath

The Secure Programming Group at the University of Virginia's Department of Computer Science is responsible for the development and ongoing maintenance of Splint. David Evans leads the project and serves as its main developer. Memory bounds checking was created by David Larochelle. Significant contributions to Splint's development were also made by University of Virginia students, including Chris Barker, David Friedman, Mike Lanouette, and Hien Phan. Splint serves as the evolution of LCLint, a tool that originated from a collaborative research effort between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Digital Equipment Corporation's System Research Center. David Evans was also the chief designer and developer of LCLint. The initial concept for a static checking tool aimed at identifying discrepancies between LCL specifications and their C implementations came from John Guttag and Jim Horning. Their insights into the design and functionality proved invaluable, playing a crucial role in shaping both LCLint and its successor, Splint. Together, the team has fostered a robust environment for developing tools that enhance software reliability and security.

ZeroPath (YC S24) is an AI-native application security platform that delivers comprehensive code protection beyond traditional SAST. Founded by security engineers from Tesla and Google, ZeroPath combines large language models with deep program analysis to deliver intelligent security testing that finds real vulnerabilities while dramatically reducing false positives. Unlike traditional SAST tools that rely on pattern matching, ZeroPath understands code context, business logic, and developer intent. This enables identification of sophisticated security issues including business logic flaws, broken authentication, authorization bypasses, and complex dependency vulnerabilities. Our comprehensive security suite covers the application security lifecycle: 1. AI-powered SAST 2. Software Composition Analysis with reachability analysis 3. Secrets detection and validation 4. Infrastructure as Code scanning 5. Automated PR reviews 6. Automated patch generation and more... ZeroPath integrates seamlessly with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps and many more. The platform handles codebases with millions of lines across Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Go, Ruby, Rust, PHP, Kotlin and more. Our research team has been successful in finding vulnerabilities like critical account takeover in better-auth (CVE-2025-61928, 300k+ weekly downloads), identifying 170+ verified bugs in curl, and discovering 0-days in production systems at Netflix, Hulu, and Salesforce. Trusted by 750+ companies and performing 200k+ code scans monthly.