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Flint++

A Cross Platform Port of Facebook's C++ Linter

Flint++ is cross-platform, zero-dependency port of flint, a lint program for C++ developed and used at Facebook.

This project was motivated by a desire for a modern and extendable C++ Linter that just worked. Facebook had already done a fantastic job with their flint project; but through an unnecessarily high number of dependencies, poor documentation, and OS dependent coding the project is almost unusable. Flint++ aims to solve these problems by only using the C++11 std::library along with a minimal number of polyfill functions developed to bridge the gaps in the needed functionality.

The original flint is published on Github; and for discussions, there is a Google group.

Upcoming Features

  • More lint tests!
  • Visual Studio Integration!
  • JSON Config files to allow project dependent Lint settings
    • Set custom blacklisted identifiers/token sequences/includes
    • Enable/Disable certain tests
    • Track the config file with Git to give everyone on your team the same Lint checks

Current Lint Checks

  • Errors
    • Blacklisted Identifiers
    • Initialization from Self
    • #if ... #endif Balance
    • memset Usage
    • Include Associated Header First
    • Include Guards
    • Inl-Header Inclusions
    • Check for unamed mutex holders
    • explicit single argument constructors
    • try-catch by reference
    • Check for throw new ...
    • Check unique_ptr arrays
  • Warnings
    • Blacklisted Sequences
    • #define name rules
    • Deprecated #includes
    • Check for static scope
    • Warn about smart_ptr usage
    • implicit casts
    • protected inheritance
    • Check exception inheritance
    • Check for virtual destructors
    • function level throws
  • Advice
    • nullptr over NULL

Usage

$ flint++ --help
Usage: flint++ [options:] [files:]

-r, --recursive		  : Search subfolders for files.
-c, --cmode			  : Only perform C based lint checks.
-j, --json			  : Output report in JSON format.
-v, --verbose		  : Print full file paths.
-l, --level [def = 3] : Set the lint level.
		            1 : Errors only
		            2 : Errors & Warnings
		            3 : All feedback

-h, --help		      : Print usage.

Does it pass Linting itself?

Yes!

$ flint++ ./

Lint Summary: 13 files
Errors: 0 Warnings: 0 Advice: 0

Compiling Flint++ from source

From the flint subdirectory, use make with the included makefile to build on a Posix based system using G++ > v4.7. To run the simple output test case run make tests after compilation. This will run Flint++ on the test directory and compare its output to the text stored in tests/expected.txt.

Why Lint?

Linting is a form of static-code analysis by which common errors and bad practices are flagged for review. This can help to both optimize poorly written code and to set a unified code style for all the code in a project. For large organizations this can be tremendously powerful as it helps to keep the whole codebase consistent.

Dependencies

Windows, Unix, Linux, OSX

None! You're good to go! Happy linting :)

Edit: It's not really a dependency, but it's worth noting that this project makes extensive use of the C++11 Feature Set. You probably won't be able to compile it on a Pre-C++11 version of your compiler.

Tested On

So far I've managed to compile and test Flint++ on Windows 7/8/8.1, Ubuntu 14.04, and Raspbian Wheezy; compiling under MSVC++ '13 and G++ 4.7 respectively. Edit: We also have word people have successfully compiled under OSX with Clang 3.5

Lead Contributers: @L2Program (Joss Whittle) & @kanielc (Denton Cockburn)

##Pull Requests Welcome!