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Static code analysis is extremely difficult. You have to have a notion of what an "error" is, and the complexity of interaction between different pieces of a codebase grows exponentially, making feasible analysis of big projects very difficult without throwing in heuristics to simplify the analysis at a cost of loss of precision.

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The problem here is if hardware and algorithms for static analysis are improving at linear pace, applications are growing at least exponentially (if we add-in 3rd party libraries).

There are some algorithms and techniques that will improve static analysis in a greater than linear fashion (however, I wouldn't guarantee exponentially).

see Model Verification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kripke_structure_(model_checkin... and SMT solving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMT_solver

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