[cfe-dev] Static analysis tool development

[Monty Zukowski]

I'm glad to hear all the details of your analyzer.  I'll have more
questions later, I'm sure, but for now this is what interests me most:

> Another high-level goal of the analyzer is to support the relaying of rich
> diagnostics to end-users about how a bug manifests in their program.  The
> diagnostic reporting mechanism in the analyzer also uses a set of abstract
> interfaces so that bug reports can be rendered in a variety of ways (e.g.,
> to the console, to an HTML page, within an IDE, etc.).  Providing rich
> diagnostics is an important goal because without them the results of a
> static analysis algorithm is only useful to graduate students studying
> program analysis techniques rather than programmers who want to fix bugs.

As you mentioned later, issue tracking is very important and the
analyzer can be designed to help with that.  It seems to me that that
could be the best use of Google's money to get this tool into its most
useful state.  I can see you've put a lot of thought into the other
analysis which can be added to the tool later.  I'm not an expert in
that area so I'll probably leave that area untouched.

In any event, you've described a tool which seems to have been
designed to be both extensible and useful and for that I'm very
excited.  It seems like such an obvious need, doesn't it?

Monty

P.S. I'll be offline on holiday and probably won't answer any other
emails until Monday night or Tuesday.