Detection of architecture violations in C/C++ applications

In a small project, I am experimenting with a cleaner and in this case layered architecture for certain parts of PoDoFo. I think it is a quite usual problem, to have an architecture and a grown application and you would like to check whether the sources adhere to the previously defined architecture. Therefore, it is important to have tools to check for architecture violations. These can be used to validate the architecture at certain points of time or even after each commit to the source repository on a continuous integration server.

I did not know any tool which can easily do this kind of validations for C/C++ source code, so I came up with a small bash script that does exactly this. The only configuration needed are some rules that define the architecture. Architecture is in this case a layered architecture where certain modules are only allowed to include certain other modules. See image 1 for a small UML diagram of the architecture.



These rules can be edited at the top of the script:

RULES="content->structure \
content->datatype \
content->io \
content->util \
structure->datatype \
structure->io \
structure->util \
datatype->io \
datatype->util \
io->util \
content->fontconfig \
content->Carbon \
util->\.\. \
src->.* \
.*->tr1 \
.*->sys"

As you can see, it is also possible to use regular expressions. Also, I had to add some rules for includes like fontconfig (external libraries) that are not available in the UML diagram above.

The script produces quite a lot of output, but grepping for "violation" shows only the important results:


If you are interested you can get the bash script from here: check_architecture.sh The script should be self-explaining and pretty easy to adapt to your needs.