What open source C++ static analysis tools are available? [closed]
Java has some very good open source static analysis tools such as FindBugs, Checkstyle and PMD. Those tools are easy to use, very helpful, runs on multiple operating systems and free.
Commercial C++ static analysis products are available. Although having such products are great, the cost is just way too much for students and it is usually rather hard to get trial version.
The alternative is to find open source C++ static analysis tools that will run on multiple platforms (Windows and Unix). By using an open source tool, it could be modified to fit certain needs. Finding the tools has not been easy task.
Below is a short list of C++ static analysis tools that were found or suggested by others.
- C++ Check http://sf.net/projects/cppcheck/
- Oink http://danielwilkerson.com/oink/index.html
- C and C++ Code Counter http://sourceforge.net/projects/cccc/
- Splint (from answers)
- Mozilla's Pork (from answers) (This is now part of Oink)
- Mozilla's Dehydra (from answers)
- Use option
-Weffc++for GNU g++ (from answers)
What are some other portable open source C++ static analysis tools that anyone knows of and can be recommended?
Some related links.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis
- http://www.chris-lott.org/resources/cmetrics/
- A free tool to check C/C++ source code against a set of coding standards?
- http://spinroot.com/static/
- Choosing a static code analysis tool
CppCheck is open source and cross-platform.
Mac OSX:
brew install cppcheck
Concerning the GNU compiler, gcc has already a builtin option that enables additional warning to those of -Wall. The option is -Weffc++ and it's about the violations of some guidelines of Scott Meyers published in his books "Effective and More Effective C++".
In particular the option detects the following items:
- Define a copy constructor and an assignment operator for classes with dynamically allocated memory.
- Prefer initialization to assignment in constructors.
- Make destructors virtual in base classes.
- Have "operator=" return a reference to *this.
- Don’t try to return a reference when you must return an object.
- Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators.
- Never overload "&&", "||", or ",".
Under development for now, but clang does C analysis and is targeted to handle C++ over time. It's part of the LLVM project.
Update: While the landing page says "The analyzer is a continuous work-in-progress", it is nevertheless now documented as a static analyzer for both C and C++.
Question: How can I run GCC/Clang for static analysis? (warnings only)
Compiler option: -fsyntax-only
Oink is a tool built on top of the Elsa C++ front-end. Mozilla's Pork is a fork of Elsa/Oink.
See: http://danielwilkerson.com/oink/index.html
Someone else mentioned -Weffc++, but that is actually one of the only GCC warnings I do not turn on by default. However, the set of warnings that I do turn on is the most important static analysis tool in my kit. You can see the complete list of recommended warnings.
In summary:
-pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Wdisabled-optimization -Wformat=2 -Winit-self -Wlogical-op -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wnoexcept -Wold-style-cast -Woverloaded-virtual -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wsign-conversion -Wsign-promo -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wstrict-overflow=5 -Wswitch-default -Wundef -Werror -Wno-unused
Note that some of these require a new version of gcc, so you may need to eliminate them from your list if you are stuck back on 4.5 or something.