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I'm a little skeptical that it doesn't use a standard parser like clang. My gut instinct, from experience with crappy c++ "parsers", would be that it works great 95% of the time, but fails the 5% of the time when it'd be most useful.

On the other hand, given the author, and the fact he explicitly mentions wanting to support C++11, I'm not sure my skepticism is warranted.

I wonder if anybody's tried it on a big C++ code base outside of Facebook?

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> I wonder if anybody's tried it on a big C++ code base outside of Facebook?

I used a similar tool (cppcheck => http://cppcheck.sourceforge.net/) which also does not try to build a correct AST and does no proper semantics. The results are surprisingly useful, and most importantly it's very easy to add user-defined checks (edit: of course you also get some related false positives but it's very flexible).

It doesn't seem that flint parses at all – it only tokenizes, and then you write "rules" on "streams of tokens." It kinda sounds like a set of fancy regexes, but on tokens instead of characters.

That’s exactly right. And tokenising C++ is infinitely easier than parsing it, though there are still the odd context-sensitive edge cases like “> >” versus “>>”.

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