Someone else is developing their own app-specific rewrite tools. In this case app-specific refers to automating porting code from gtk2 to gtk3. The approach is similar in that patches are produced, but it doesn’t look like a patch aggregating tool is written yet. Instead of the elsa/mcpp magic sauce, clang is being used, so this is limited to C at the moment.

KDE folks are behind in automated code rewrites arms race, perhaps the trolls should try some pork to accelerate KDE3->4 transition

All kidding aside, it is awesome to see that less-manual-labour-through-compiler-assisted-refactoring approach is gaining mindshare.

New Static Analysis Toys

I have been catching up on my backlog of little bugs, here are some of the most notable ones.

Benjamin has been pushing the limits of what Dehydra can do for his DXR prototype which resulted in a couple of cool new features with one new feature breaking backwards compatibility. Sorry about that, it is for the greater good.

Dehydra now processes more declarations.

Dehydra uses JavaScript prototypes to distinguish between types and declarations.

Treehydra is now built by default when building with a plugin-enabled compiler.

Treehydra now exposes the C++ frontend’s verbose and as-close-as-gcc-gets-to-written-code syntax tree via process_cp_pre_genericize. Access to the early C++ AST should make it easier to automatically translate a certain class of C++ functions into JavaScript.

Coming soon: buildbot setup for Dehydra along with autobuilt debian packages.

I have never enjoyed the theory behind software engineering. It seems particularly depressing as it can be summarized as: “What can we learn from past software development experience in order to not repeat old mistakes such that we can come up with newer and shinier mistakes?”.

For that reason I haven’t been able to stick to any particular software development doctrine (paired, test-driven, OO, SOA, etc) and instead taken shortcuts to whatever is practical at the time.

One unfortunate result of such neglect is that the oink test suite ended up not being utilized. I tried it a couple of times while starting out with oink and it failed in many cumbersome ways. However, as pork evolved out of oink, I learned more about the “architecture” behind it, I fixed a couple of the issues that were causing funny make errors.