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Coala – Code Analysis Application

coala-analyzer.org

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Re: Coala – Code Analysis Application

#3

Post by nikolay »

galistoca wrote: post #2

Cool project, but gotta say that abbreviation feels a bit too forced....think it deserves more fitting name (no trolling, just thinking it would be easier to remember if the initials actually mapped to the keywords)

I agree. You don't owe explanation to a brand name (even a weird spelling one) - especially in the heading. The FAQ can have the origin.

Re: Coala – Code Analysis Application

#4

Post by kevindeasis »

So it's language agnostic.

Can anyone tell me the rocket science behind this?

How would a library know if a code and its libraries are performing software development/engineering best practices?

What types of algorithms do you use and are there other libraries that already does this that is language agnostic?

Re: Coala – Code Analysis Application

#5

Post by michaelmior »

kevindeasis wrote: post #4

So it's language agnostic. Can anyone tell me the rocket science behind this? How would a library know if a code and its libraries are performing software development/engineering best practices? What types of algorithms do you use and are there other libraries that already does this that is language agnostic?

I think you're expecting it to be something more exciting than it is (I was too at first.) It's just a front end for static analysis tools. Coala doesn't do any analysis on its own. Everything is delegated to other tools. It just provides a way to pass configuration in and to parse the output so you know what lines in the source file have problems.

Code Climate does something similar with their Engines[0] specification. Personally I like how they make use of Docker containers to perform the analysis. It is perhaps a bit heavyweight for simple analyses but it makes it really easy to install different language runtimes and tools.

[0] https://github.com/codeclimate/spec

Re: Coala – Code Analysis Application

#7

Post by sils »

michaelmior wrote: post #5
kevindeasis wrote: post #4

So it's language agnostic. Can anyone tell me the rocket science behind this? How would a library know if a code and its libraries are performing software development/engineering best practices? What types of algorithms do you use and are there other libraries that already does this that is language agnostic?

I think you're expecting it to be something more exciting than it is (I was too at first.) It's just a front end for static analysis tools. Coala doesn't do any analysis on its own. Everything is delegated to other tools. It just provides a way to pass configuration in and to parse the output so you know what lines in the source file have problems. Code Climate does something similar with their Engines[0] specificati…

Indeed. coala is more of a framework that allows you to plug in any analysis routine. However, it also provides means to create new code analysis very easily and combine arbitrary routines.

So yes, there are some very simple generic algorithms (line length checking, spacing corrections, we have things like variable name checking in the works which only need a few lines "language definition") and you can combine them with - possibly wrapped or not - language dependent algorithms easily.

This is useful for the user because he doesn't have to learn and configure tons of tools and he has some basic functionality for every language - even the ones he writes tomorrow.

It's also useful for people writing static code analysis because they can just write their algorithm and be done with it - why should everybody rewrite a CLI interface, editor plugins and so on?

I wrote a thesis about code clone detection (another algorithm that is basically generic and would need only a relatively small parsing part per language, coala allows me to modularize meanfully into parsing and language independent AST processing) and it just took me a few functions that actually performed the analysis. People can now use it easily which usually isn't true for research programs and I had even less work than I would have if I had written it without coala.

Re: Coala – Code Analysis Application

#8

Post by sils »

an_account_name wrote: post #6

Utterly missing from this article is what kind of analysis you can do.

Thanks, I added a link right on top of http://coala-analyzer.org/ to clarify it a bit. The website isn't particularly good, we're working on a new one which provides lots of cool things and better information, probably implemented by a GSoC student.

Re: Coala – Code Analysis Application

#9

Post by sils »

nikolay wrote: post #3
galistoca wrote: post #2

Cool project, but gotta say that abbreviation feels a bit too forced....think it deserves more fitting name (no trolling, just thinking it would be easier to remember if the initials actually mapped to the keywords)

I agree. You don't owe explanation to a brand name (even a weird spelling one) - especially in the heading. The FAQ can have the origin.

Good suggestion, I've created a FAQ stub and we're tracking this here if you're interested in how this goes: https://github.com/coala-analyzer/website/issues/22

Thanks!

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