Design Guidelines

Changes on the cxx plugin should follow the below design guidelines:

• the main purpose of the cxx plugin is to forward reports from 3rd party tools to SonarQube
  • we don't like to reinvent the wheel
• the cxx plugin expects to be fed with syntactically correct code
  • use an external compiler to get detailed syntax and semantic issues
• the cxx plugin is responsible for syntax highlighting
• the cxx plugin is responsible to create software metrics
• we always try to follow the KISS principle

erroneous configuration:

• in case of an erroneous configuration the scanner should stop with an error
  • should not create a new snapshot on the SonarQube Server
• configuration errors are recorded in the scanner LOG file
• configuration errors should not lead to technical debt

erroneous reports:

• we support a tolerant and strict error handling mode sonar.cxx.errorRecoveryEnabled
  • in tolerant mode (True) analysis continue in case of errors in a report file
  • in strict mode (False) an error in a report file will stop the analysis

source code parsing:

• we support a tolerant and strict error handling mode sonar.cxx.errorRecoveryEnabled
  • in tolerant mode (True) syntax errors within a declaration are skipped, analysis is continued with next declaration in source code file
  • in strict mode (False) analysis of source code file fails after a syntax error. Source code file is ignored.

strategy for grammar extensions

1. prefer grammar extensions using the preprocessor, see Dealing with compiler specific code pieces
2. if 1. is not possible and extension does not conflict with 'C/C++ standard' extension of grammar is allowed.