coding style - What open source C++ static analysis tools are available?

CppCheck is open source and cross-platform.

Mac OSX:

brew install cppcheck 

Concerning the GNU compiler, gcc has already a builtin option that enables additional warning to those of -Wall. The option is -Weffc++ and it's about the violations of some guidelines of Scott Meyers published in his books "Effective and More Effective C++".

In particular the option detects the following items:

• Define a copy constructor and an assignment operator for classes with dynamically allocated memory.
• Prefer initialization to assignment in constructors.
• Make destructors virtual in base classes.
• Have "operator=" return a reference to *this.
• Don’t try to return a reference when you must return an object.
• Distinguish between prefix and postfix forms of increment and decrement operators.
• Never overload "&&", "||", or ",".

Under development for now, but clang does C analysis and is targeted to handle C++ over time. It's part of the LLVM project.

Update: While the landing page says "The analyzer is a continuous work-in-progress", it is nevertheless now documented as a static analyzer for both C and C++.

Question: How can I run GCC/Clang for static analysis? (warnings only)

Compiler option: -fsyntax-only

Oink is a tool built on top of the Elsa C++ front-end. Mozilla's Pork is a fork of Elsa/Oink.

See: http://danielwilkerson.com/oink/index.html

Someone else mentioned -Weffc++, but that is actually one of the only GCC warnings I do not turn on by default. However, the set of warnings that I do turn on is the most important static analysis tool in my kit. You can see the complete list of recommended warnings.

In summary:

-pedantic -Wall -Wextra -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wctor-dtor-privacy -Wdisabled-optimization -Wformat=2 -Winit-self -Wlogical-op -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-include-dirs -Wnoexcept -Wold-style-cast -Woverloaded-virtual -Wredundant-decls -Wshadow -Wsign-conversion -Wsign-promo -Wstrict-null-sentinel -Wstrict-overflow=5 -Wswitch-default -Wundef -Werror -Wno-unused

Note that some of these require a new version of gcc, so you may need to eliminate them from your list if you are stuck back on 4.5 or something.