Re: clang static analyzer

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 07:11:24AM +0100, Tomas Carnecky wrote:

> Clang again found many dead assignments/increments, but in the earlier
> discussions you concluded that you want to keep those around. So I
> focussed on another class of potential bugs: Argument with 'nonnull'
> attribute passed null. There were a total of seven such issues. I then
> tried to look through the code and see if they are valid or false
> positives:

Thanks, I think you are moving in the right direction to manually
investigate the output of clang, since it obviously does generate some
false positives.

I think the next step for each site you found would be:

  1. If it really is a problem, then it should be easy to show a simple
     case that can trigger the issue. Submit a patch fixing that site,
     either describing the test case in the commit message, or adding a
     case to the test suite.

  2. If it is a false positive, see what it would take to silence clang
     and submit a patch.  I don't think we are opposed to annotations
     that help analysis tools as long as those annotations aren't too
     intrusive or make the code less readable.

-Peff