External tools integration

DrScott

Note: This is a very long-term goal, nothing to be attempted now.

Problem

Years ago, I tried to write a Quality Assurance program for Xojo called Reality Check. It was essentially lint for Xojo. Unfortunately, I had to give up on it because I could not access the Xojo compiler’s AST to find antipatterns and automatically correct them by refactoring code (all I could do was to examine the source code itself and detect a limited set of antipatterns), nor could I access the linker’s symbol table for other necessary checks.

This could be a nice addition to Objo.

Proposed Solution

An API to examine and rearrange the AST, and to examine the symbol table — either directly within Objo Studio or in a plugin?

Example Workflow

Alternatives Considered

None.

Who Would This Help?

This would help all Objo programmers to examine their code quality and fix at least some issues.

Garry

An interesting suggestion. Potentially not as much work as you might think since the IDE already does this in Objo with its own multi-file compiler and analyser.

What would the use case be if this is already available in the IDE? There is a live analyser, the AI tools built in can query it and there is code completion and symbol information on hovering.

DrScott

If the AI can handle analyzing code quality/best practices, then a QA tool would be superfluous. I’ll investigate this a bit more to see how well AI handles it.

DrScott

Here are some of the tests that Reality Check did on Xojo code. You may want to add some of these to the Objo code analyzer.

Classes:

If a class has no superclass, constants, properties, events or menu handlers, and all methods are public, it can be converted to an interface or a module.
If a class has no methods, events or menu handlers, it can be converted to a structure.
An exception class name should include the word "Exception".
If this class class is referenced by another class more than 3 times, the other class is using features of this class too much. Its functionality may be in the wrong class and class responsibilities may need to be moved.
No constructors defined.
Too many constructors present. May need to subclass.
All constructors require parameters. Define one constructor without parameters.
Too many methods -- class is trying to do too much and should be refactored into multiple smaller classes.
Too many properties -- class is trying to do too much and should be refactored into multiple smaller classes.
Check class coupling.

Conditionals:

Boolean compared to true or false
For loop may be converted to For-Each loop
Goto used.
Negations used in Boolean tests.
Nested conditional statements can become difficult to understand and debug.
Select statement with under 3 branches. Consider changing to If-Else statement.
If statement with over 3 ElseIfs can can become difficult to understand and debug. Consider changing to Select Case statement.
Methods with over 3 loops may need to be refactored into multiple smaller methods.

Constants:

Constant never referenced. Can be deleted.
Constant only referenced by one method within the class. May be defined within the method.

Interfaces:

Interface declared in superclass need not be redeclared in subclass

Local Variables:

Local variable never referenced. Can be deleted.
Local variable reinitialized to zero before use.

Methods:

Too many lines of code (comment lines ignored) in method -- Should be refactored.
Boolean method should start with a possessive or action verb
Empty method, but not redefined in a subclass. Can be deleted.
Method never called outside of its class. Can be made private.
Method has too many parameters -- makes calling method more prone to errors.
Parameter never referenced. Can be deleted.
Parameter always has same value.
Check cyclomatic complexity of methods.

Properties:

Property never referenced. Can be deleted.
Property only referenced by one method within the class. Can be converted to a local variable.
Property only referenced by its own class. Can be made private.

Garry

Thank you for this info - it's really useful. I've created a feature request to improve Objo's analyser with some of these detections (those that I think are the best fit for Objo): https://feedback.objo.dev/feature/169

A very cool tool you seem to have built there. Well done.

DrScott

Thanks for the compliment!

Garry

I've added several of your suggested analyser improvements for the next release.