[cfe-dev] Static analysis tool development

[Ben Laurie]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Nikita Zhuk <sonja.zhuk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 17.1.2009, at 17.12, Ben Laurie wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Nikita Zhuk <nikita at zhuk.fi> wrote:
>>>
>>> If/when clang static analyzer will allow easy extensibility as Ted
>>> described in option [3], it would be very interesting to see if clang
>>> user community could come up with some collaborative way of sharing
>>> various custom checks as pluggable & configurable components. A wiki,
>>> perhaps? I think that sharing programming experience and knowledge as
>>> clang analyzer checks for common programming errors and best practices
>>> would be useful for open source community.
>>
>> What would be wrong with just integrating them into the source and
>> having them invdividually enableable?
>
> There's nothing wrong with integrating additional checks into clang, of
> course. However, as a Mac developer and clang user I would like to be able
> to download and install additional checks simply by dropping the downloaded
> binary into some directory, without recompiling clang each time I'd like to
> try a new check which some other developer has written. I also suspect that
> some checks could exist which aren't completely in line with clang's goals,
> e.g. which generate too many false positives for average project, but which
> would be beneficial in projects of a specific type. For example, I have
> written some specific coding convention checks which have way too high level
> of false positives for being included into the official clang, but which are
> useful for developers who follow the same conventions.

I am totally a fan of modular plugin designs (I wrote the Apache 2
plugin management system, for example), so very much agreed.

How well does the current architecture support dynamic plugins?
Perhaps support for that is somewhere I could be instantly useful! :-)