Dead code detection in legacy C/C++ project [closed]

by

You could use a code coverage analysis tool for this and look for unused spots in your code.

A popular tool for the gcc toolchain is gcov, together with the graphical frontend lcov (http://ltp.sourceforge.net/coverage/lcov.php).

If you use gcc, you can compile with gcov support, which is enabled by the ‘–coverage’ flag. Next, run your application or run your test suite with this gcov enabled build.

Basically gcc will emit some extra files during compilation and the application will also emit some coverage data while running. You have to collect all of these (.gcdo and .gcda files). I’m not going in full detail here, but you probably need to set two environment variables to collect the coverage data in a sane way: GCOV_PREFIX and GCOV_PREFIX_STRIP…

After the run, you can put all the coverage data together and run it through the lcov toolsuite. Merging of all the coverage files from different test runs is also possible, albeit a bit involved.

Anyhow, you end up with a nice set of webpages showing some coverage information, pointing out the pieces of code that have no coverage and hence, were not used.

Off course, you need to double check if the portions of code are not used in any situation and a lot depends on how good your tests exercise the codebase. But at least, this will give an idea about possible dead-code candidates…

More Related Contents:

  1. Dead code identification (C++)
  2. What open source C++ static analysis tools are available? [closed]
  3. How to Generate a calling graph for C++ code
  4. How can I know which parts in the code are never used?
  5. How to raise warning if return value is disregarded?
  6. Creating, opening and printing a word file from C++
  7. Static analysis tool to detect ABI breaks in C++ [closed]
  8. Can branches with undefined behavior be assumed unreachable and optimized as dead code?
  9. Redirect both cout and stdout to a string in C++ for Unit Testing
  10. How to determine the Boost version on a system?
  11. What can make C++ RTTI undesirable to use?
  12. Macro / keyword which can be used to print out method name?
  13. Lambda Expression vs Functor in C++
  14. How can I see the output of the Visual C++ preprocessor? [duplicate]
  15. C++11 memory_order_acquire and memory_order_release semantics?
  16. C++ bool returns 0 1 instead of true false
  17. returning an abstract class from a function
  18. How to convert a const char * to std::string [duplicate]
  19. C / C++ How to copy a multidimensional char array without nested loops?
  20. Using shared_ptr in dll-interfaces
  21. How to implement “_mm_storeu_epi64” without aliasing problems?
  22. How to convert a string literal to unsigned char array in visual c++
  23. How to Run Only One Instance of Application
  24. Call C++ code from MATLAB?
  25. const in C vs const in C++
  26. Is substitution performed on a variadic parameter pack type if the pack is empty?
  27. Variable Sized Struct C++
  28. What is a reference-to-pointer?
  29. #ifdef vs #if – which is better/safer as a method for enabling/disabling compilation of particular sections of code?
  30. __attribute__((format(printf, 1, 2))) for MSVC?

Leave a Comment