On Thursday, 10 January 2013 at 10:18:38 UTC, Benjamin Thaut
wrote:
Am 10.01.2013 09:37, schrieb comco:
There is a rationale for such checks, but I argue that the
place of
these checks is not in the compiler itself, but in a separate
tool.
But there are no such tools yet for D.
Couldn't we add a -analyze flag to the compiler which will do
such checks? Other compilers like the microsoft c++ compiler
provide such a flag too.
A simple flag just won't cut it, because the state that you want
to represent is wider. Some rules are speculative in nature,
others can be easily broken if you are using some sort of
automatic code generation - for example image a GUI forms visual
editor which emits D code. It won't be smart enough to follow all
the guidelines of the language, still the emitted source code
should be considered fine. You at least will need something like
a level or target flag - for me assembly code when writing high
level code is unacceptable, but for low-level stuff its a must.
So you'll need a separate specification of the kind of analyzing
you want for the particular code. You'll want some of the rules
to be turned off.
Another thing is that if the effort to create such tool is
comparable to the effort of adding an analyze flag to the already
existing compiler, then in my opinion creating a tool would be
the better option - its more nice and separated this way.
