Is there some ultra fast "syntax check my code, but don't compile mode" for g++/clang? Where the only goal is to just check if the code I have is valid C++ code?
Asked
Active
Viewed 6,183 times
3 Answers
18
-fsyntax-only for GCC, this should probably work for Clang as well since they emulate GCC's command line options. Whether or not it's significantly faster, you'll have to time.
Dan Olson
- 22,849
- 4
- 42
- 56
-
The speed issue is really how much time is spent on read source I/O, on syntax checking, how much time compiling, and how much time doing object output I/O. I suspect that with enough source includes read I/O may be a large portion and you'll see minimal gain from syntax checking only. – Mark B Apr 05 '10 at 14:33
-
1@Mark: In my experience caching the compiled output with ccache made almost always sense. And don't forget that C++ might also include templates which can make pure compile times skyrocket. – Benjamin Bannier Jun 19 '10 at 22:31
-
Note that in g++, this only parses the code and doesn't instantiate, so you can miss many errors. clang++ stops after instantiation, which can take a bit longer but is more useful. Also, some of the g++ warnings are produced during the code optimization phase, so you'll miss those as well. – Marc Glisse Jan 10 '13 at 17:35
0
You can have a look at gcc-xml ( http://www.gccxml.org/HTML/Index.html ), which reuses the gcc frontend to produce an xml description of the source.
Another option is to use the edg frontend ( http://www.edg.com/index.php?location=c_frontend ), but is is not open source, and far from cheap.
tonio
- 10,355
- 2
- 46
- 60
