I read Dave
Jones’ comments about better tools yesterday.

Not that it helps kernel hackers, but in Java land there are a
variety of useful tools; they really are hugely better than the
corresponding C or C++ tools. Eclipse compiles while you type and has
all kinds of nice features based on the fact that it fully understands
your program — refactoring, smart completion, smart browsing. Tools
like FindBugs or CheckStyle are handy for
analyzing your code in various extensible ways. Even the java
compilers seem to have better warning control.

The Eclipse CDT guys are developing C and C++ parsers that build
an AST of your program which other parts of the CDT can then use,
essentially replicating the java approach. It would be interesting to
extend the CDT with a kernel hacker’s plugin to perform various static
checks that Dave mentions, though I suspect most kernel hackers would
react with horror at this idea.

There’s also GCC-XML for C++
users. Some goofy politics seem to prevent integration of this into
GCC, which is a shame. In my opinion, one of the primary goals of
front-end writers should be to enable reuse for other tools; this is
one reason I wrote the bulk of gcjx as a library.