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Static Code Analysis Tools?
rewt66 asks: "We are looking for a good static analysis tool for a fairly large (half a million lines) C/C++ project. What tools do you recommend? What do you recommend avoiding? What experience (good or bad) have you had with such tools?"
That's great and all, but some things just take a lot of code. Refactoring into libraries only goes so far, you're still going to have a ton of code, it'll just be split up in libraries. That's useful, and it's good advice, but since the poster didn't ask about it, you could at least give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the project is already organized appropriately. Half a million lines isn't that big, certainly not big enough to automatically assume their codebase is organized badly.
That may be part of the problem. Cheap junior programmers from India doing cut'n paste coding.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
There's nothing wrong with having lots of code in a project. A solution with 1000 libraries of 500 lines each is no better. Don't break stuff up just for the sake of not having a lot of code in a project. Break it up and refactor it if it NEEDS it for context/architecture/organization reasons.
I agree that much code is far longer than it needs to be, but I don't think it's fair to equate this with large projects.
IME, large projects (over a million lines, say) often get that way because they have been built around some sort of framework, and the boilerplate code pushes the line count up. When you get past a certain scale -- more than a handful of developers, or with the team split across multiple geographic locations, that sort of thing -- such frameworks can be very valuable in retaining a sane, structured overall design. Since most of it is typically generated rather than hand-crafted, it doesn't really impact on developer productivity; if anything, it helps it, by maintaining some kind of order in systems that are otherwise too large for any one individual to fully comprehend. (This assumes the framework is well designed and not itself wasteful and overcomplicated, of course.)
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible for a library that should take 1,000 lines in a couple of files to expand to 10,000 lines across five different files. This sort of thing can be a killer, with cluttered interfaces to modules, inefficient algorithms written in verbose style, and so on.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And part == project?
.DLL is a project internally.
Is is SAP a single project, and are all those individual parts considered projects too? Perhaps a single
You seem to be missing the point that there is no clear definition or scale for a project, atleast not in the world outside of yours where every single compiled module seems to be a "project".
In real-life, a project may be anything from rebuilding an entire set of applications to fixing a typo in a batch file.
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