Do you think that static analysis is a valuable tool for security research? Do you recommend static analysis software to a single developer with a limited budget or an amateur?
Yes, both :) There are a few in public domain that might be helpful to experiment with. Clang has had a static analyzer for a while and GCC 10 adds one as well (and the maintainer is looking for help with implementing checkers so that's a good way to gain experience with writing one).
would love to see a couple of detailed comments on this directly as well, I know that one of yall is a maintainer of an analyzer, maybe just some general discussion on beginning to learn C while at the same time incorporating a static analyzer and what that would look like.