[ILUG] Looking for a lint clone

[P at draigBrady.com]

Bryan O'Donoghue wrote:
> Inhabitants of ILUG.. lower your shields and surrender your vessels...
> 
> ...Greetings !
> 
> What do people out there in ILUG land use, or recommend to use, as a
> lint type scource code checker ?
> 
> splint, (*)lint ? Is there a semi-universally accepted obvious choice (tm) ?

I tried splint (3 years ago) and thought it wasn't great.
Previoiusly I used flexelint: http://www.gimpel.com/ and
thought it was great.

valgrind is a related tool which is excellent.

> Ideally, I'd like a tool which could intercept the following.
> 
> char x[2];
> memset(x, 0x0,20); ?

Note a common error related to that is to switch the
last 2 arguments to memset. ( grep 'memset.*0[^,]*)' ):
http://www.livejournal.com/users/kernelslacker/5755.html
Note the comment at the bottom there that newer gcc/glibc's
issue a warning for this.

> Be that a runtime piece of magic software... else... a source code
> parser, with some damn good (tm) context awareness.
> 
> Disclaimer : I've never used lint... but, people keep raving about it to
> me. For the case above valgrind emphatically won't catch that error, or
> if it will, I don't know the correct runtime incantation to make it do so.

You get some of lint's functionality by using the -Wall gcc option,
and this will get better as commented above.

Personally I find -Wall + valgrind adequate.

-- 
Pádraig Brady - http://www.pixelbeat.org
--