Discuss tools

[milleniumbug]

This issue is to discuss tools - formatters, build systems and others.

I nominate clang-format

[nabijaczleweli]

👍 for clang-format

[nabijaczleweli]

I also suggest ninja (build system) and CMake

The build system thing is hairy. CMake sucks a lot imo. make/autoconf, scons, waf, gyp, msbuild/devenv, nmake, qmake, they all suck. Ninja is cool, but it's incomplete - you need a generator. I 👍 ninja only right now.

I tried astyle, it looked decent, but I heard clang-format is better. Someone to second millenium here?

lol I just missed your nab. Okay, add it guys.

[nabijaczleweli]

ninja isn't incomplete in that regard - it's specifically designed to be generated, rather than written by hand, as indicated on the project page:

it is designed to have its input files generated by a higher-level build system

It's specifically designed to be incomplete. You want a build system, you pick ninja, you have to walk the extra mile to actually have something working. I know it's not very hard to do it yourself, but you still have to do it.

[nabijaczleweli]

Any idea on what description to add for clang-format? There doesn't seem to be an "official" one.

[Morwenn]

The static analyzer Cppcheck is really simple to use and helped me to catch subtle things from time to time; I think it's worth mentioning. Also, valgrind catches some bugs too from time to time.

[milleniumbug]

+1 for valgrind

[Morwenn]

I have heard that the sanitizers available in Clang and GCC are great too (undefined behaviour, address and thread sanitizers). Some of them do what valgrind does but with a lower overhead. Too bad they do not work with MinGW. I wish I could test them.

[nabijaczleweli]

But those are compiler built-ins (-fsanitize=address), so they don't qualify as "tools" per se.

[Morwenn]

It's more like they are branded as additional tools that just happen to be directly incorporated in the compiler. And it seems that not enough people know about them.