Thorsten's Blog In the trenches with OpenOffice.org's graphics subsystems

More on source code grokking tools

After having played a bit with cpd, I went searching for more elaborate source code analysis tools. And there are some, even in the FLOSS realm:

• pygccxml, a gcc plugin to generate XMLized output from the AST (plus a python framework to actually work with this representation).
• gccxml, quite similar to pygccxml, focused on extracting declarations only.
• synopsis, a standalone parser plus analysis framework - a bit lacking for c++, which is inherently hard to parse.
• opencxx, same as above (actually a predecessor/inspiration for synopsis)
• rtlcheck, a gcc plugin that extracts code on the RTL (register-transfer level). Currently, seems to be used only for c, extending that to c++ should be both easy & rewarding (as rtlcheck appears to be the most elaborate project of all listed).
• Also quite interesting, though with different scope (being a runtime-analysis tool) is the Design Recovery Tool, roughly characterizable as a means to get from UI actions to the code involved processing them.

I do like the gcc patching/plugin approach the most, knowing how complex it is to get c++ parsing even half-way right. And as OpenOffice.org is such a beast, code-size wise, getting all the help we could from automatic tools appears wise to me.

Posted at 12:38PM Feb 14, 2006 by thorsten in OpenOffice.org  |