Wednesday 24 June 2020

Static code analysis report

With Kaduria I have not been consistent in checking code quality until now. I was thinking that it can be done "later" when the project is in testing phase and using code analysis on such a large project can be tedious. But I have since then began to run at least CppCheck on the whole project.

The nice feature of static code analysis is that you can find some bugs for free. There is no need to find them yourself and waste time on that. It also improves code quality when you can remove unused functions and other things like that. Some warnings like missing explicit and override keywords can be annoying, but adding them also is an improvement in code quality.

The tools I'm using are CppCheck, Visual Studio's W4 warning level and static code analysis with clang option (you can turn it on in project settings). There are some commercial tools which could be nice, but I don't have the money for those, at least in scope of money I'm getting from game development (which is 0.00€). GCC has also compiler settings for static analysis, but at the moment I don't have GCC installed and for that I would have to figure out a way to compile Kaduria in GCC in clean way.

Static analysis is good at finding errors in logic like comparisons which are always true or false, but more complex things would possibly require some kind of artificial intelligence to detect the problem. Maybe it is the future of analysis tools.