MISRA is a bloated mess from the accounts I've seen, no doubt to encourage paying for it. If u remove all the filler and padding the substantial part may be 40 rules.
There should be a new C that obviates the substantial parts of MISRA.
There should be a new C that obviates the substantial parts of MISRA.
Case in point: MISRA C forbids goto statements primarily because it can mess up static analysis. Yet this rule is gratuitously followed even when no static analysis tools are used, thus yielding none of the gains that you trade off for occasionally writing ugly code.
Otherwise, you're right. The value goes out the window without enforcement, without compliance.
The rules themselves are not meaningless or without a point, but there are a lot of companies that adopt MISRA without actually having (in the sense of audit and certification) to be compliant. Instead of focusing on the point of every provision, they rigidly follow them even when not applicable.
But it can be worse, really. The gem of a coding standard we have at $work forbids not only goto, but also break, without MISRA's exception of one break per loop. And forbidding the use of goto and continue is cited as being done for readability reasons, rather than static analysis tools.