What open source C++ static analysis tools are available?

CppCheck is open source and cross-platform.

Mac OSX:

brew install cppcheck

Concerning the GNU compiler, gcc has already a builtin option that enables additional warning to those of -Wall. The option is -Weffc++ and it's about the violations of some guidelines of Scott Meyers published in his books "Effective and More Effective C++".

In particular the option detects the following items:

  • Define a copy constructor and an assignment operator for classes with dynamically allocated memory.
  • Prefer initialization to assignment in constructors.
  • Make destructors virtual in base classes.
  • Have "operator=" return a reference to *this.
  • Don’t try to return a reference when you must return an object.
  • Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators.
  • Never overload "&&", "||", or ",".

Under development for now, but clang does C analysis and is targeted to handle C++ over time. It's part of the LLVM project.

Update: While the landing page says "The analyzer is a continuous work-in-progress", it is nevertheless now documented as a static analyzer for both C and C++.

Question: How can I run GCC/Clang for static analysis? (warnings only)

Compiler option: -fsyntax-only