Lints, Condate and bugs

[bearophile]

>From my experience I've seen that lint tools are very useful to quickly find many bugs, on the other hand most of my friends don't use them. This is a problem I've felt for some time. Recently I have found an interesting paper that expresses my feelings better:

"Condate: A Proto-language at the Confluence Between Checking and Compiling" by Nic Volanschi
http://mygcc.free.fr/condate-ppdp06.pdf


A quote from the first part of the paper:

>
Existing tools use various approaches, but share a common, apparently minor design choice: they are specialized tools, doing only program checking. There are several important drawbacks of this design:

- most of the tools are completely decoupled from existing development environments

- they duplicate a considerable amount of work on program parsing and program analysis; this is true even for tools that achieve a superficial level of integration by being called automatically from existing IDEs or makefiles

- they afford to perform costly analyses, which make them unsuitable for daily use throughout development; at best, existing tools aim only at scalable analyses

- last but not least, many programmers completely ignore their existence.

As a consequence of these and maybe other reasons, for instance related to usability or to limited distribution policies (some proprietary tools being kept as a competitive advantage), checking tools are not used on a large scale nowadays.

To solve the above design-related issues, we propose to integrate some amount of user-defined checking within the core of every development process -- the compiler.
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All this is related to the "mygcc" that's the kind of plug-in for GCC I have talked about recently. It uses a half a page of rules to find lot of bugs in C code. I don't know if similar rules may be written to catch bugs in D code too, because the bugs are often of different kind (and maybe less simple).

If you want more info about Condate:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.69.2171

Bye,
bearophile