SAS (Static Analysis Suite) is a powerful tool for running static analysis on C++ code. SAS runs in parallel with compilation and as such can run useful and fine-grained checks; currently included are checks for code formatting, naming conventions, thread safety, performance and usage of modern language constructs. SAS is easy to use and supports user-written custom checkers.
SAS wraps the Clang compiler and runs a number of checkers, which may be general or project-specific. Any errors found are written to an html file that is displayed in the report index.
Using SAS in continuous integration will help projects to maintain safe, readable and consistent code.
The following software is required to run SAS:
- CMake version 2.8 or newer.
- Clang/LLVM version 3.5 or newer.
- Python 2.7 or newer. In order to generate custom checkers from yaml files, the
yamlmodule must be installed.
On lxplus or any slc6 system at CERN, run the following commands to setup the required environment:
source /afs/cern.ch/sw/lcg/external/llvm/3.6/x86_64-slc6/setup.sh
source /afs/cern.ch/sw/lcg/views/LCG_85/x86_64-slc6-gcc49-opt/setup.sh
Clone the SAS repository and run the following:
export SASBUILDDIR=[name for build directory]
export SASINSTALLDIR=[name for install directory]
export LLVM_DEV_DIR=[name of LLVM dev directory]
mkdir $SASINSTALLDIR
mkdir $SASBUILDDIR;cd $SASBUILDDIR
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="../$SASINSTALLDIR" ../SAS
make install
replacing the square-bracketed terms with approprate names.
This installs SAS with the default checkers (general coding conventions, thread-safety and performance) enabled.
The following CMake options can be used to enable further checkers:
-DFCCSW_CHECKERS=ON: enable FCCSW naming convention checkers (see FCCSW documentation)-DROOT_CHECKERS=ON: enable ROOT naming convention checkers (see ROOT/Taligent documentation)-DEXAMPLE_CHECKERS=ON: enable the example checker (checks that variable names begin with a capital letter)
##Using SAS For more detailed SAS options and alternative ways to run SAS, see the Using SAS section of the documentation.
The simplest way to run SAS is through CMake. Within the project directory, run the command
export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:$SASINSTALLDIR
to set the cmake prefix path, and then add the lines
find_package(sas)
enable_sas()
to the project's CMakeLists.txt after the project() command to enable sas. This replaces the C++ compiler with the SAS Clang wrapper, so executing
cmake [path to project source directory]
make
will run all enabled SAS checks on the project's source and header files. Once this is complete, the command
make report_index
will generate an HTML index displaying the files containing coding convention violations and detailing the errors found.
- When running CMake, an error
'''
You have changed variables that require your cache to be deleted.
Configure will be re-run and you may have to reset some variables.
'''
may be raised. If this occurs, add the arguments
'''
-DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=
which sas_check++-DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=which sas_check''' to the CMake command.
SAS originates from an effort within the CMS collaboration at CERN and quite some checkers were imported from CMSSW (http://cms-sw.github.io/). CMSSSW and its authors cannot be blamed by any mistake or bug present in SAS :-) The credit of single developers is preserved within the single source files. The first version of SAS was created by F. Bartek, D. Piparo and T. Hauth.
Implementation of running SAS through CMake and FCCSW naming convention checkers was carried out by David Ho in a 2016 Summer Student project under supervision of Joschka Lingemann.
The HTML summary page relies on bootstrap and hightlight js (see below for links).
- LLVM: http://llvm.org
- Clang: http://clang.llvm.org
- Clang Static Analyzer: http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org
- scan-build: http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/scan-build.html
- CMake: http://www.cmake.org
- Bootstrap: http://getbootstrap.com/
- Highlight-js: https://highlightjs.org/
SAS is licenced under LGPL3.