I have been honoured by the voters for the upcoming Meeting C++ conference. My submission got the most votes for the popular track without me whipping the votes*.

I have to say that it will be awesome to have the opportunity (and challenge) to speak at the same location where the great Scott Meyers will be the keynote speaker.

If you are close to Berlin in December and love C++, I guess there is no better place to be.

(*) I’ve been waiting to use this phrase since I first saw the “In the loop” and “House of Cards” :)

There was a post recently about running a static code analysis tool on Qt 5 with some rather cute results. The main purpose of the post is to advertise the tool used, but it does make a nice point of how careless we can be when writing the code.

Since KDE is a Free/Open project, we don’t usually have the necessary finances in order to be able to use the tools like the one linked above. Fortunately, not all is grim. The great people at Clang, apart from making one of the best C++ compilers, provide us with a few tools as well.

I’ve written about clang-format some time ago. Now, it is the time for another, a bit younger project - Clang Analyzer.

What is it?

The Clang Static Analyzer is a source code analysis tool that finds bugs in C, C++, and Objective-C programs. The analyzer is 100% open source and is part of the Clang project. Like the rest of Clang, the analyzer is implemented as a C++ library that can be used by other tools and applications. ~ from the project’s website

It tries to analyze the different execution paths of your code and try to detect whether some of them can lead to problems.

As an example, I’ve used it on KActivities. And I got a false-positive, but a very reasonable false-positive. Namely, one variable was not initialized when declared, and as far as the analyzer is concerned, it might have been left uninitialized till its insertion into sqlite.

In reality, it was initialized in a range-for loop which is guaranteed to have at least one iteration, which the analyzer could not have known. It took me more than a minute to explain to myself that the variable can not be uninitialized, so I can not blame the the static analysis for the false alarm.

How to use it?

At the moment, it does not have a very sophisticated mechanism of execution. It follows the usual pattern of wrapping the compiler commands (similar to icecream, colorgcc etc.).

You need to set your build to use the wrapper instead of the actual compiler.

Lets say that you have installed Clang to /usr/local and copied the llvm/tools/clang/tools/ directory to /usr/local/share/clang/ (the analyzer is not installed by default, so you need to copy it manually).

You can create a separate build directory (in my case /opt/kf5/build-analyzer/path/to/your/project) and invoke cmake from there like this:

cmake /path/to/your/project's/sources \
    ...options you normally pass to cmake ... \
    -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/local/share/clang/tools/scan-build/c++-analyzer

After cmake finishes its magic, run the analyzer:

/usr/local/share/clang/tools/scan-build/scan-build \
    --use-analyzer=/usr/local/bin/clang++ make

It will compile your project and analyze it at the same time. It will take much more time than an ordinary compilation run, but that is to be expected because of all the additional work it does.

To see the results, you need to run the scan-view command which will start a small web-server and point your web browser to it. You’ll be able to browse the detected issues from there. It nicely displays the sequence points that lead to the detected problem.

In my previous post, I wrote about a plugin for switching between header and source files (with the support for private classes) for C and C++.

The plugin has evolved for the last two days. It gained another mode, which will also be usable outside of the C/C++ world.

• Full mode - Finding related files based on the words in the file’s name

If you use the CamelCase, or the snake_case naming scheme for your files, the plugin will extract the words from the current file’s name and search (using the find command) for the files that have any of those words in their names.

For example, for ResourceActor.scala, it will return:

ResourceTable.scala ResourceService.scala SomethingElseActor.scala

It is still available at github.com/ivan-cukic/vim-ctrlp-switcher

Hope somebody finds it useful. Everyone is encouraged to contribute or star the project.

Update: continuation of the story: “Even better file switching for Vim”

I’ve been using the vim-fswitch plugin for switching between .h and .cpp files for a long time now. The thing I was really missing was the inability to switch to private headers and implementations (filename_p.h and filename_p.cpp)

Recently, I discovered the (more than awesome) CtrlP plugin. I am not going to explain here what it is - I strongly advise you to check it out!

I’ve written a small extension for it which provides the header/source/private files switcher.

One of my favourite C++11 features are lambdas.

The syntax is a bit cumbersome, but it was the best approach the committee could take without creating a new sub-language. Every part of the syntax has a reason for why it exists.

But, it still is a bit ugly, and can influence readability of the surrounding code quite a bit.

The thing that annoys me the most is the lambda head - the capture block and the arguments it takes. Those are very important when writing the code, but not (that much) when reading it.

My solution for this? The conceal feature of Vim.

The good thing about lambdas is that they are (meant to) be used as local anonymous functions. That means that, while reading other parts of the code, you don’t actually need to know what the lambda is capturing, nor which are its arguments. So, it doesn’t hurt to hide them, right?

Naturally, when you want to edit the lambda head, Vim shows the actual contents of line, and not just some strange Greek symbol. :)

This also lowers the desire to use the potentially problematic [&] and [=] as the capture block, instead of explicitly capturing the variables that you need.

Edit: The code to achieve this:

.vimrc:
    set conceallevel=1
.vim/after/syntax/cpp/cpp.vim
    syn match cpp11_lambda "[[a-zA-Z0-9&= ,]*] *(.*)( *{)\@=" conceal cchar=λ
    syn match cpp11_lambda "[[a-zA-Z0-9&= ,]*]( *{)\@=" conceal cchar=λ