Ask Slashdot: What Tools To Clean Up a Large C/C++ Project?

An anonymous reader writes I find myself in the uncomfortable position of having to clean up a relatively large C/C++ project. We are talking ~200 files, 11MB of source code, 220K lines of code. A superficial glance shows that there are a lot of functions that seem to be doing the same things, a lot of 'unused' stuff, and a lot of inconsistency between what is declared in .h files and what is implemented in the corresponding .cpp files. Are there any tools that will help me catalog this mess and make it easier for me to locate/erase unused things, clean up .h files, and find functions with similar names?

Comments

Static analysis tools...

[underqualified]

If you're company is willing to pay for it, you can get something like Coverity. On the free(as in beer) side there is CppCheck and clang.

clang static code analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

scan-build and scan-view from clang++ will show you what is being used and what isn't as far as static code analysis goes.

Few ideas

[postmortem]

1. Modern IDE with good gcc parser: Eclipse, Netbeans, 3rd party paid ones. Not Visual Studio. You want it to build call hierarchy tree for you, so that you can find methods that are unused. It will require some manual steps
1a. if you have $, Understand for C/C++ is proprietary tool that will map a hierarchy of your code.
2. perform structural coverage analysis of code in live action, will help map the dead code. gcov is free if you can use it.

Re:Does Lint Exist anymore

[OrangeTide]

Compiler warnings have mostly caught up with the capabilities of Lint. There are some things Lint still does, but there are lots of things it warns about that have, as far as I know, never been the cause of a real bug. Getting a project to be 100% warning free with gcc -Wall is possible, and usually possible with -Wextra (maybe not so much with g++). The warnings usually are valuable, and I've personally seen bugs that could have been caught with gcc's warnings. Other compilers have other warnings and personalities, but I think it's worthwhile to investigate using warnings to check out a project with any compiler.