Most static analysis tools don’t let you script them. Oink is an example of that. Adding a new analysis requires extending an existing tool with a feature which may not fit in smoothly or writing a new tool in C++ with the corresponding boilerplate to handle command-line arguments, etc.

At the other extreme lives UNO which has a DSL that is designed strictly for solving control-flow programs.

I chose JavaScript for Dehydra to get the power of a full-blown (and memory safe) programming language while keeping JS’s view of the code under analysis as simple as possible. I think I got the C++/JS mix just right, the C++ codebase is growing slowly, yet I add JS scripts for any little task.

Additionally JS came in handy for publishing the data on the web. I wrote a script to determine the class inheritance graph. Then I added a little prefix to the file produced, combined it with jsviz and ended up with a really slow and unusable, but somewhat pretty class browser. This could evolve to be a rather neat way to supplement LXR.