The Clang Static Analyzer

See the official clang static analyzer page for background.

We don‘t run this regularly (because the analyzer’s support for C++ isn't great yet), so everything on this page is likely broken. The last time I checked, the analyzer reported mostly uninteresting things. This assumes you're building chromium with clang.

You need an llvm checkout to get scan-build and scan-view; the easiest way to get that is to run

tools/clang/scripts/update.py --force-local-build --without-android

With make

To build base, if you use the make build:

builddir_name=out_analyze \
PATH=$PWD/third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/bin:$PATH  \
third_party/llvm/tools/clang/tools/scan-build/scan-build  \
    --keep-going --use-cc clang --use-c++ clang++ \
    make -j8 base

(builddir_name is set to force a clobber build.)

Once that's done, run third_party/llvm/tools/clang/tools/scan-view/scan-view to see the results; pass in the pass that scan-build outputs.

With ninja

scan-build does its stuff by mucking with $CC/$CXX, which ninja ignores. gyp does look at $CC/$CXX however, so you need to first run gyp_chromium under scan-build:

time GYP_GENERATORS=ninja \
GYP_DEFINES='component=shared_library clang_use_chrome_plugins=0 \
    mac_strip_release=0 dcheck_always_on=1' \
third_party/llvm/tools/clang/tools/scan-build/scan-build \
    --use-analyzer $PWD/third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/bin/clang \
    build/gyp_chromium -Goutput_dir=out_analyze

You then need to run the build under scan-build too, to get a HTML report:

time third_party/llvm/tools/clang/tools/scan-build/scan-build \
    --use-analyzer $PWD/third_party/llvm-build/Release+Asserts/bin/clang \
    ninja -C out_analyze/Release/ base

Then run scan-view as described above.

Known False Positives

Stuff found by the static analyzer