Hello all, In the context of the GlobalGCC project (http://www.ggcc.info, http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-10/msg00676.html) we are developing a facility for automatically enforcing coding rules.
Coding rules codify "good programming practices" that improve reliability and maintainability in languages such as C or C++, known for containing many error-prone features (not to be confused with coding style-guides, even if the boundary is diffuse). You can find a more detailed explanation in http://www.ggcc.info/?q=codingrules This tool will be presented in the GCC Developers Summit 2008 in a few weeks, and can be downloaded and tested following the instructions found at http://www.ggcc.info/files/README-codingrules.txt We are using two Git repositories: one for a modified version of GCC (initially cloned from the http://git.infradead.org/gcc.git repo), and another for other files outside the GCC tree. The Ciao Prolog System is needed for running the checker. Our modified version of GCC can dump some information about a C++ program in the form of Prolog facts. Then, a Prolog engine is used for codifying coding rules and search the dumped data for violations of the rules. Very few rules are implemented right now but, hopefully, some more rules will be added in the next days/weeks. At time being, only structural information (classes, inheritance, methods, variables, types) is dumped, and only the middle-end of the compiler has been modified. We plan to extract information from the front-end(s) as well (e.g. templates, friend declarations, syntactic features) to enrich the rule definition language. Even sophisticated analysis done in some optimization passes could be profited for implementing some coding rules. We are using some Tracs for coordination and bug reporting, but we have still to define how to coordinate tracs for different git repos. If you are interested in the project I suggest to send me an e-mail. Regards, -- Guillem Marpons Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - Babel Group
