cppclean

Goal

cppclean attempts to find problems in C++ source that slow development in large code bases, for example various forms of unused code. Unused code can be unused functions, methods, data members, types, etc to unnecessary #include directives. Unnecessary #includes can cause considerable extra compiles increasing the edit-compile-run cycle.

This is a fork of the original cppclean project. The original project home page, which no longer contains code, is at https://code.google.com/p/cppclean/.

Features

cppclean finds the following:

Classes with virtual methods, no virtual destructor, and no bases
Global/static data that are potential problems when using threads
Functions that are declared but not defined
Unnecessary forward class declarations
Unnecessary function declarations
Undeclared function definitions
Unnecessary #includes in header files
- No direct reference to anything in the header
- Header is unnecessary if classes were forward declared instead
Inconsistent case in #includes (foo.h versus Foo.h)
(planned) Unnecessary #includes in source files
(planned) Source files that reference headers not directly #included, ie, files that rely on a transitive #include from another header
(planned) Unused members (private, protected, & public) methods and data
(planned) using namespace std in header files
(planned) Methods that are declared but not defined

AST is Abstract Syntax Tree, a representation of parsed source code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_syntax_tree).

Installation

$ pip install --upgrade cppclean

Run

$ cppclean <path>

Multiple include paths can be specified:

$ cppclean --include-path=directory1 --include-path=directory2 <path>

Current status

The parser works pretty well for header files, parsing about 99% of Google's header files. Anything which inspects structure of C++ source files should work reasonably well. Function bodies are not transformed to an AST, but left as tokens.