If you were around the analyzer for a while now, you must've seen a lot of patches that awkwardly puts code from one library to the other:
- D75360 moves the constructors of CheckerManager, which lies in the Core library, to the Frontend library. Most the patch itself was a struggle along the library lines.
- D78126 had to be reverted because dependency information would be utilized in the Core library, but the actual data lied in the frontend. D78126#inline-751477 touches on this issue as well.
This stems from the often mentioned problem: the Frontend library depends on Core and Checkers, Checkers depends on Core. The checker registry functions (registerMallocChecker, etc) lie in the Checkers library in order to keep each checker its own module. What this implies is that checker registration cannot take place in the Core, but the Core might still want to use the data that results from it (which checker/package is enabled, dependencies, etc).
D54436 was the patch that initiated this. Back in the days when CheckerRegistry was super dumb and buggy, it implemented a non-documented solution to this problem by keeping the data in the Core, and leaving the logic in the Frontend. At the time when the patch landed, the merger to the Frontend made sense, because the data hadn't been utilized anywhere, and the whole workaround without any documentation made little sense to me.
So, lets put the data back where it belongs, in the Core library. This patch introduces CheckerRegistryData, and turns CheckerRegistry into a short lived wrapper around this data that implements the logic of checker registration. The data is tied to CheckerManager because it is required to parse it.
Side note: I can't help but cringe at the fact how ridiculously awkward the library lines are. I feel like I'm thinking too much inside the box, but I guess this is just the price of keeping the checkers so modularized.
edit:
In detail:
- Move all data structures, dumps, -help flag printers as well as a getter function from CheckerRegistry to CheckerRegistryData. CheckerRegistry can only be constructed now with by passing a data object as a constructor, so it acts as a glorified initialization function.
- CheckerManager now owns an instance of CheckerRegistryData, and confines the lifetime of the CheckerRegistry to the constructor's body.
- Rename InitializationFunction to RegisterCheckerFn.
placer -> place