We’ve got an ambitious vision for the C/C++ plugin this year. To fulfill it, we started with some under-the-cover improvements to the parser and the internal data model. Those improvements were really just a means to an end, but they’ve had the effect of markedly improving our ability to parse and analyze C and C++ code.

Unfortunately, they came with a downside: a higher analysis configuration burden. For instance, in order to correctly expand macros in the code (and we can, now), we need to know what the macro means. Which means that the macro definition needs to be passed in to the analysis.

Just contemplating the configuration update required for a single large system made me queasy, and I wasn’t the only one. So we set the main plugin aside for a little while this spring and wrote a build wrapper, which will eavesdrop on the tool of your choice (e.g. Make or MSBuild) to gather all the extra configuration data for you.

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