[PATCH] D40937: [clang-tidy] Infinite loop checker

[Gábor Horváth via Phabricator via cfe-commits]

xazax.hun added a comment.

I think, while the analyzer is more suitable for certain kinds of checks that require deep analysis, it is still useful to have quicker syntactic checks that can easily identify problems that are the results of typos or incorrectly modified copy and pasted code. I think this check is in that category.  Also, the original warning Peter mentioned does something similar but has some shortcomings.

The current implementation is not path sensitive. It uses flow sensitivity to check for escaping values.
If we would try to port this check to the static analyzer, the questions we would ask from the analyzer are universally quantified (e.g. for all path this variable does not escape and does not change). Unfortunately, it is not that easy with the current analyzer to answer such questions. The static analyzer is better with existential questions (e.g. there is a path such that the condition variables are not escaped and are unchanged in the loop). Using the latter formulation we might have a larger number of false positives because the analyzer sometimes hit infeasible paths.  In the first approach, the infeasible paths are less of a problem (they might cause false negatives but not false positives), but we need to be careful with all the peculiarities of the analyzer because it does not guarantee to discover all possible paths.

Hopefully, Devin will correct me if I'm wrong :)


https://reviews.llvm.org/D40937