Linters have obvious benefits but, like any tool, can be hard to use. Not all users have the time to install a linter and inspect its output. Also, some linters show many false-positives and cause the code to be littered with ignore X comments. Another problem is that any suggestion by the linter is only interesting once. After a decision is made on applying the suggestion, the suggestion should not come back.
So, I figured that it might be useful to periodically generate the lint results for many repositories and show the results on a website.
- The declarative way of describing rewrite rules with Comby is nice but has its limitations. The biggest problem is that Comby cannot use or infer types.
- Coming up with rewrite rules can be quite difficult because often rules
- suggest rewrites which alter program behaviour (!!)
- show too many false positives
- suggest only minor improvements