• bearophile (35/35) Nov 16 2012 The LLVM 2012 Developers' Meeting has released some more slides.

"bearophile" <bearophileHUGS lycos.com> writes:

The LLVM 2012 Developers' Meeting has released some more slides. 
LLVM "back-end" tools are directly used and usable by the LDC 
compiler, and even some of the Clang front-end-like parts 
designed for C/C++11 are probably adaptable for the LDC 
front-end/glue layers.

The Clang Static Analyzer is a bug finding tool that can be 
extended with custom checkers. This talk shows how
to write them, "Building a Checker in 24 hours", by Anna Zaks and 
Jordan 
Rose:http://llvm.org/devmtg/2012-11/Zaks-Rose-Checker24Hours.pdf

Some ideas for potential checkers to implement, most of them are 
C++-specific, and many of them are not needed for idiomatic D 
code:
http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/potential_checkers.html

Some of the ones I've appreciated (I think they are all usable in 
D):

different.IdenticalExprBinOp
different.IdenticalCondIfElseIf
SuccessiveAssign
different.IdenticalStmtThenElse
different.CondOpIdenticalReturn
different.LogicalOpUselessArg
different.SameResLogicalExpr
different.IntegerOverflow
different.SignExtension
optimization.PassConstObjByValue


Such things are important, so I think that a new modern language 
should offer ways to write similar checkers in the language 
itself, in library code, instead of having to push them in an 
external tool like this Clang Static Analyzer.

The good alternative is to not need similar checkers in the first 
place, because the language is designed more safely, or because 
it offers simpler ways to enforce such semantic safety, or both.

Bye,
bearophile