lint for D

[Markus Koskimies]

On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 01:42:17 +0100, Bruce Adams wrote:

> Hi all,
> Alas this is not an announcement. It should be relatively easy
> to
> knock up a few noddy scripts that can detect some kinds of potential
> problem. I occasionally find myself doing this for coding standard
> related things. The unused variable warning thing would seem to be a
> good start. How about writing a lint tool that starts with that as its
> only requirement and going forward from there?
[...]
> Any thoughts?

I have followed a little bit about conversation of D compiler warnings 
and such, and I know that there are people who think that these kinds of 
things should go to another tool.

I must disagree with this. Just like D has integrated doc generator, I 
would like to see it bundled with a tool doing all kinds of static checks 
also; it need not to be integral inside, but released with compiler and 
automatically invoked by the compiler. The reason for this hope is very 
simple - it would make things simple from developers point of view. Just 
write:

	dmd <all my D files>

...And it would not only compile the executable (possible recognizing 
which files need to be recompiled, normally done by make), but also run 
static checker. That's also the reason why I like the "-od" -style 
options (telling directories to put things).

I know that the UNIX way of thinking is to put everything in to separate 
programs, but that was just my thought.