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What open source C++ static analysis tools are available? [closed]
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Solved c++static-analysis
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Java has some very good open source static analysis tools such as FindBugs, Checkstyle and PMD. Those tools are easy to use, very helpful, runs on multiple operating systems and free.

Commercial C++ static analysis products are available. Although having such products are great, the cost is just way too much for students and it is usually rather hard to get trial version.

The alternative is to find open source C++ static analysis tools that will run on multiple platforms (Windows and Unix). By using an open source tool, it could be modified to fit certain needs. Finding the tools has not been easy task.

Below is a short list of C++ static analysis tools that were found or suggested by others.

What are some other portable open source C++ static analysis tools that anyone knows of and can be recommended?

Some related links.

Kyliekylila answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(3)
Commercial, DMS Software Reengineering Toolki, handles Java, C, C++, and COBOL, provides parsing, AST building, name/type resoltion, control/data flow analysis, custom analysis and transformation. See semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html. – Gonorrhea
For commercial tool there's also CppDepend (cppdepend.com), and maybe the trial version could be sufficient for students. – Satang
clang-tidy should be on the list. – Earache
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Oink is a tool built on top of the Elsa C++ front-end. Mozilla's Pork is a fork of Elsa/Oink.

See: http://danielwilkerson.com/oink/index.html

Kokoschka answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(1)
I have compiled 1000+ programs in my life, but for the love of God I cannot compile this package no matter what. I tried to use Fedora, Ubuntu, WSL, Cygwin, MSYS2, Windows - but no. Something is always missing and the documentation is just plain awful. Don't get me wrong, I guess the tool is superb. But the website and documentation looks like no one touched them in 10-15 years. – Watereddown
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CppCheck is open source and cross-platform.

Mac OSX:

brew install cppcheck
Usually answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(2)
@gio I have not seen any issues personally. I believe CppCheck has the ability to ignore or exclude certain paths or files, which helps narrow down the scope. – Usually
On Windows: choco install cppcheck – Legroom
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Concerning the GNU compiler, gcc has already a builtin option that enables additional warning to those of -Wall. The option is -Weffc++ and it's about the violations of some guidelines of Scott Meyers published in his books "Effective and More Effective C++".

In particular the option detects the following items:

  • Define a copy constructor and an assignment operator for classes with dynamically allocated memory.
  • Prefer initialization to assignment in constructors.
  • Make destructors virtual in base classes.
  • Have "operator=" return a reference to *this.
  • Don’t try to return a reference when you must return an object.
  • Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators.
  • Never overload "&&", "||", or ",".
Deianira answered 27/9, 2008 at 20:24 Comment(2)
In addition to gcc’s -Wall and -Weffc++, -Wextra does some good free static analysis, e.g., branches which don’t return a value, or checking an unsigned for being less than zero. It’s remarkable how often professional programmers think the latter is a good idea… – Jury
Yuck, -Weffc++ warns about tons of constructs that are perfectly fine in a large codebase. I second the suggestion of -Wextra, though; don't leave home without it! – Uncovenanted
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Under development for now, but clang does C analysis and is targeted to handle C++ over time. It's part of the LLVM project.

Update: While the landing page says "The analyzer is a continuous work-in-progress", it is nevertheless now documented as a static analyzer for both C and C++.

Question: How can I run GCC/Clang for static analysis? (warnings only)

Compiler option: -fsyntax-only

Dourine answered 29/9, 2008 at 2:6 Comment(2)
LLVM is a very interesting project that compared to gcc, generates mo re optimized binaries in less time; and clang, when complete, will be its front-end... – Deianira
Another editor added the information on the -fsyntax-only switch. Just note that it is essentially a request to run the analysis that the compiler would run without actually compiling, and emit the warnings. I'm not sure, but I think that's different from the static analysis. – Dourine
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Oink is a tool built on top of the Elsa C++ front-end. Mozilla's Pork is a fork of Elsa/Oink.

See: http://danielwilkerson.com/oink/index.html

Kokoschka answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(1)
I have compiled 1000+ programs in my life, but for the love of God I cannot compile this package no matter what. I tried to use Fedora, Ubuntu, WSL, Cygwin, MSYS2, Windows - but no. Something is always missing and the documentation is just plain awful. Don't get me wrong, I guess the tool is superb. But the website and documentation looks like no one touched them in 10-15 years. – Watereddown
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Someone else mentioned -Weffc++, but that is actually one of the only GCC warnings I do not turn on by default. However, the set of warnings that I do turn on is the most important static analysis tool in my kit. You can see the complete list of recommended warnings.

In summary:

-pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Wdisabled-optimization -Wformat=2 -Winit-self -Wlogical-op -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wnoexcept -Wold-style-cast -Woverloaded-virtual -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wsign-conversion -Wsign-promo -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wstrict-overflow=5 -Wswitch-default -Wundef -Werror -Wno-unused

Note that some of these require a new version of gcc, so you may need to eliminate them from your list if you are stuck back on 4.5 or something.

Pirtle answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(0)
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John Carmack also mentions PVS-Studio in this interesting blog post on "Static Code Analysis".

Smarten answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(1)
It's neither "open source" and absolutely and positively not "free" in any kind of meaning of that word. It's well known static analysis tool (second to only coverity I think), but it's pricetag is fairly high. – Chickie
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If by Open Source, you really meant "free", then Microsoft's prefast analysis is a good one. Windows-only ofcourse. It is fully integrated in Visual Studio & the compiler. e.g.:

cl /analyze Sample.cpp
Asquint answered 27/9, 2008 at 7:59 Comment(2)
Which version & edition is this available in? – Starspangled
Seems to be built into the compiler, which is free. The integration is probly Team edition only. – Lyall
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Mozilla's static analysis work is probably worth a look.

Ukase answered 27/9, 2008 at 8:24 Comment(0)
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Splint seems to fill the bill for C.

If you didn't specify open source I'd say Gimpel Software's PCLint is probably one of the best tools available for static code checking in C++. But, of course, it's not open source.

Mac OSX: 

brew install splint
Shirley answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:52 Comment(3)
But expensive for a single developer :) I like free better – Trihydric
splint is for C, not C++. I don't know if they plan to expand coverage or not. Hope so! – Sorilda
Yes, pclint worth a try, it's counter-part in unix is called flexe-lint, the 9.0 version is must faster that 8.x version, the 9.0 version also support pre-compiled header to speed up analyze. It takes time for you to tame pc-lint, it has false-positive which may take you to trouble if you cannot selectively ignore it. – Silurid
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Microsoft's PREFast is also available in the Windows Driver Kit. Version 7.0 is downloadable here.

The Microsoft docs state that it should only be run against driver code but this (old) blog post lays out steps to run it. Perhaps it can be integrated into a normal build process?

Chrestomathy answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(2)
PREFast will slow down your build process a lot, for any real project, your build server maybe cannot afford it. – Silurid
@zhaorufei: Most static analysis aren't "fast"; they have a pretty complex code analysis job to do, by definition. If you don't like the build cost all the time, just make it optional. – Gonorrhea
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We have been working on an Eclipse CDT plug-in called metriculator. Its still under development but some major metrics (e.g. LSLOC, McCabe, EfferentCoupling) are already implemented.

See http://sinv-56013.edu.hsr.ch/redmine/projects/metricular/wiki/Documentation for more details like video demonstration and documentation.

The latest nightly build is available for installation via update site at: http://sinv-56013.edu.hsr.ch/metriculator/updatesite-nightly/site/

Further Description

Metriculator statically analysis C++ source code and generates software metrics. Metrics are implemented as Codan checkers. The analysis results can be explored in a separate view. Each metric has configurable properties (e.g. a threshold for 'max lines of code per function'). Exceeding these threshold will report a problem and create a marker in the source code editor.

with metriculator you can:

  • analyse C++ files / folders / projects
  • define metric thresholds and enable / disable metric using Codans preference page
  • have problem markers in source code editors
  • explore metric results
  • export metric results as tag cloud (available as optional feature via update site)

Currently metriculator comes with the following metrics:

  • McCabe (Cyclomatic Complexity)
  • EfferentCoupling per Type
  • Logical Source Lines of Code
  • Number of Members per Type
  • Number of Parameters per Function
Banlieue answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(0)
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One can also code extensions of GCC in MELT (a domain specific language designed for extending GCC) or GCC plugins in C (much harder) to do some custom analysis.

Dichromic answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(2)
Have read one of the PDF about MELT and extending gcc with melt, my feeling is that it's still too complex/diffcult to add your own plugins to gcc. Not practical way for common user. – Silurid
Extending GCC is complex, whatever way you do it (thru C plugins, thru MELT or even thru Python). This is because GCC is complex. And customizing any C++ static analysis tool is hard because the C++ language specification is very complex, and you'll need to handle most of that complexity (any non-trivial C++ program uses a lot of C++ features, perhaps thru the C++ standard library). – Dichromic
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You should try oo-browser it has awesome integration with xemacs

Algeciras answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(0)
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Doxygen does some control flow analysis and generates graphs. Those may not be what you're looking for, but I've foudn them useful to look at.

Kenon answered 26/9, 2008 at 19:43 Comment(0)

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