excal 0.0.1

Extendable Clang AST based c/c++ linter

EXCAL - Extendable Clang AST based Linter.

This is a simple project implementing a C/C++ linter based on the clang AST. The main porpoise is to create a tool which is easily extendable via plugins.

Installation

Plugins

The Goal of this project is to provide an interface that allows it to easily implement linter rules based on an AST.

A Plugin will need to provide a register method in which it will register itself within the Project. The Plugin then can provide a class inherits from the NodeVisitor class. Here the visit_X functions can be overwritten. When parsing the AST, these functions will be called whenever a desired Node is reached. From there further operations may be done on the provided AstNode.

See the following example:

    from visitor import NodeVisitor
    from pluginManager import PluginManager
    from astNode import AstNode
    
    PLUGIN_NAME = "AutonomusReply"
    
    class customVisitor(NodeVisitor):
        def __init__(self) -> None:
            super().__init__()
    
        def visit_class_base(self, node: AstNode) -> None:
            return
    
    def register(pm: PluginManager):
        pm.register(PLUGIN_NAME, customVisitor)

There are two ways to provide Plugins. The preferred one is to Create as a standalone python Package. See this example The other way is to put the Plugin in the plugins folder and register it in the plugins.json file.

    {
      "plugins": ["plugins.myPlugin"]
    }

All possible functions can be seen in src/visitor.py. To see which function may be needed for your use-cases run the excal project using the -p flag. This will print an AST of the desired file.