03 / THE ASYMMETRY
Us and the
incumbents.
The institutions behind the tools. Decades of accumulated work, research, and financing. Every comparison gets its source—and its units.
Not a proportional budget chart.
ON OUR SIDE OF THE BRIDGE
Small team.
Same obligation to prove it.
JourdanLabs is not a one-person company. But until Isaac Weathers joins full time, it has one developer. Every board on this site was produced by that developer, a laptop, and two agents.
Cppcheck
AN OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT · SINCE 2007
554 historical contributors
COMMITS513,553
LINESSINCE
2007
OpenHub’s September 7, 2026 analysis records 30,370 commits and 513,553 lines. These are historical contributors—not current employees. Cppcheck Solutions AB was founded in 2021.
Infer
ACADEMIC ORIGINS · META
2009 → 2013 → 2015
Monoidics started in 2009. Facebook acquired its assets and technical team in 2013; Infer was open-sourced in 2015. Peter O’Hearn and Stephen Brookes received the 2016 Gödel Prize for Concurrent Separation Logic.
Clang Static Analyzer
THE LLVM PROJECT
Research + industry
Institutional history, not an estimate of analyzer development spend.
LLVM’s authors acknowledged NSF, DARPA, IBM, and Motorola support in 2004. The broader LLVM ecosystem lists industry users including Apple, Intel, Sony, NVIDIA, and SonarSource. Users are not the same thing as Clang SA funders.
CodeQL
SEMMLE · OXFORD SPINOUT · GITHUB
$31M disclosed funding
Semmle’s own August 2018 announcement says its Series B brought total funding to $31 million. GitHub announced the acquisition in September 2019. The figure is dated company funding, not a CodeQL project budget.
SonarQube
SONARSOURCE · APRIL 2022
$412M investment round
ROUND$4.7B
2022 VALUATION
Sonar announced a $412 million round at a $4.7 billion valuation in April 2022. Those are financing and valuation figures at that date—not today’s valuation and not the amount spent building SonarQube.
Sources checked September 9, 2026. OpenHub analysis dated September 7; code collected September 6. Historical contributors, financing, valuation, and institutional support are different measures. None is presented as “what it cost to build this tool.”
THE CI BUDGET / A DIFFERENT QUESTION
What it cost
to run that night.
Approximate elapsed times from the supplied same-machine run notes. The documented scopes and per-file rates are not consistent enough to normalize across tools, so these are a run ledger, not a speed ranking.
Vantage
~16 min
Compiles nothing.
Reported: ~14 ms/file.
Cppcheck
~2 min
Compiles nothing.
Reported: ~1.4 ms/file.
Clang SA
~40 min
Path-sensitive execution per TU.
Reported: ~900 files/min.
Infer
~18 hr
Capture + Pulse per TU.
Reported: ~66 files/min.
Run scope and exact run date are not supplied. Elapsed times and rates imply different file counts. Do not calculate cross-tool speedups from this ledger. The “4,033 of 4,101 silent TUs” note also requires reconciliation with the 4,100-case quicktest label.
Clang and Infer process translation units even when they emit no finding. That is a CI-budget consideration, not evidence that one kind of analysis is universally preferable.