Static code analysis tool for multiplatform project with good coverage of C++11 features

Question

I am an old school C++ developer and even today I have no professional C++11 experience. I trust the C++ committee that the language is moving in the right direction, but it seems that in the projects I work the scepticism is dominant and a lot of the C++11 features are banned even before they are understood and explored.

Anyways, I am having a chance now to work on a new code base and I would like to apply all C++11 power, but I do not want to shoot myself in the foot.

In the past, I found some of the static code analysis tools to be extremely powerful teaching instrument to show me all these subtle aspects of the language.

For my project, I use clang, and portable libraries as STL and Boost that build on Windows, Linux, Mac and more.
I hoped clang-tidy, clang-modernize, etc. will be good tools to let me tune my behavior to the C++11 feature, but they seem to provide very limited help - it literally took me like 2-3 days to adapt to all the suggestions they do... and I am sure that there are a lot of possibilities that I am missing based on rvalue references for example.

Some features that I would like it to have:

• When copy elision is not sufficient and forwarding interface will provide optimization.

• When some of the class members are not movable and auto-generated move constructor and move assignment operator is not possible.

• When local variable could be moved if this is the last reference in its scope.

• When const auto& is better over auto.

I have no price limits.

Answer 1

In the past, for old-school C/C++ code, I used PC-lint, a commercial software developed by Gimpel Software.

The company actually develops a couple of static analysis tools: PC-lint and FlexeLint.
Pc-lint is for Windows systems, while FlexeLint runs on almost all systems that support C including VMS, OS-9, and pretty much all Unix systems.

PC-lint and FlexeLint are powerful static analysis tools that will check your C/C++ source code and find bugs, glitches, inconsistencies, non-portable constructs, redundant code, and much more. It looks across multiple modules, and so, enjoys a perspective your compiler does not have.

Regarding the C++11 support, they have a dedicated page for it:
PC-lint / FlexeLint Support for C++ 11

Full support for C++11 and C++1y is our primary focus and while we cannot provide a date for full support we anticipate a quicker release cycle as we roll-out support for the remaining features.

So, at this time of writing, they don't support all the C++11 features, but most of them seem to be there. What I like is that the development status of the features is clearly and transparently reported on that page, along with a priority (for other tools, such information doesn't seem to be that clear or easily available).
For example, in your question you mentioned rvalue, which appears to be supported:

• Language feature: Rvalue references
• C++11 Proposal: N2118
• Available n PC-Lint/FlexeLint?: Lint 9.00c

Based on the information you can find on the website and on that page, the cost involved and your project, you can evaluate if it's a tool that can fit your needs. Others might know other tools, this is the one I suggest you to have a look at.

Finally, a list of other tools for C/C++ static code analysis can be found on Wikipedia. They do not all support C++11.

Answer 2

You can try CppDepend, a pretty complete static analysis tool which integrates a wide range of features, and 100% integrated to Visual Studio.