Re: c/c++ validator

[Florian Krohm <britzel at acm dot org>]

> Tommy Vercetti <vercetti@zlew.org> writes:
> 
> | Yeah, but for more than just STL, and opensource. C++ checker that
> | is going to work for instance for KDE.
> |  Wonder why they use proprietary parser,
> 

Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:

> Most of the tools I know of are either "research projects" (which
> means that they basically "die" when the professor get promoted or the
> students graduate; they are lots of them out there) or are/ use
> proprietary tools. 
> 
> We need to get GCC/g++ to a competing level of usefulness but the road
> is not quite that straight.
> 

Yes, twice. Among the things that you need are:

- detailled source code correspondence for every TREE node,
- you want to know whether a TREE node represents something that was
  compiler generated as opposed to written in the source (e.g. for
  cast operations)
- you most likely want an unlowered representation of the C++ source
  (and that will be the real hard part)
- you don't want the frontend to optimize anything, e.g no folding
  (ideally you want both the folded and unfolded expression)
- you might want to know whether a certain TREE node was the result of
  a macro expansion

I used a very old version of GCC (3.0.1) as the frontend for some 
static checker. We succeeded in hacking in support for some of the
above but C++ was a royal pain because of lowering. 

Florian