Jesse Ruderman Reporter
	Description • 15 years ago

Might be useful to have an analysis capable of warning:

"No subclasses implement this virtual method. Does it really need to be virtual?"

I believe this would require doing analysis across compilation units, which is tricky.

	(dormant account)
	Comment 1 • 15 years ago

Actually we have a lot of those methods. These are needed to call things across shared libaries

	Jesse Ruderman Reporter
	Comment 2 • 15 years ago

Hmm, could we have a special annotation for virtual methods that are meant to cross library boundaries?  Also, if no implementations are found and the base class is abstract, there's no need to warn.

	(dormant account)
	Comment 3 • 15 years ago

(In reply to comment #2)
> Hmm, could we have a special annotation for virtual methods that are meant to
> cross library boundaries?  Also, if no implementations are found and the base
> class is abstract, there's no need to warn.

I've run into this during dead code analysis, you run into all kinds of APIs exported by mozilla that aren't used much inside.

We could mark all idl-derived stuff easily and automagically. But i'm still not sure if it's worth the hassle for the rest.

	Nathan Froyd [:froydnj]
	Comment 4 • 6 years ago

We are not realistically going to have these kinds of analyses across compilation units anytime soon.