OCLint

What do you like best?

There are rules that are finding actual bugs or helping the code be better.

E.g. collapsing if statements, path/cyclometric complexity computation, tautological compares, constant if conditions . Really helpful to keep your codebase clean and working properly.

There are also lint based rules, e.g. number of lines without a comment, number of lines/arguments in a method, number of lines/methods in a class.

Enforces splitting methods into smaller and good code style and quality.

Can be integrated into sonar.

What do you dislike?

The configuration and installation process is problematic.

The homebrew package isn't working (or you have to do additional configuration to make it work).

The command line arguments are hard to use, you have to first create a json file with the compilation database and then run oclint again instead of just having a xcodebuild wrapper.

Matching oclint version with sonar-oclint plugin version is a bother.

Oclint development isn't as fast, so sometimes they don't support newer language constructs.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Really helpful tool, it can work with Sonar to have your pull requests automatically go through oclint and fix all the remaining problems.

Finds more problems than Xcode warnings and Xcode static analyzer. Also has features about code style, e.g. method count, line count.

One of 3 static analyzer I know for Objective-C XCode, oclint, infer.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Business problem of having a good quality and maintainable codebase. It provides us with automated suggestions to keep the codebase better and more bug-free.