GSoC Project: Auto-removal of dead code through vulture.

[Rahul Jha]

Hello!

I am Rahul, pursuing Electronics Engineering. I recently started contributing to coala. It's an ever welcoming community of hard-working people who motivate me by the amount of dedication they put in coala. My gitter/github handle is RJ722.

Being a student who has been selected this year with coala, I am working on the project : Auto-removal of dead code through vulture.

Currently, we have - vulture a tool which detects and reports dead (unused) code and coala - an automatic code linter. The motivation here is to:

• Extend vulture as an API which respects the Bear's Input Output method
• Refactor VultureBear such as to use the new API - this would highly optimise it's performance.
• Enhance python whitelists for vulture.
• Implement a method to acquire the source range of dead code - currently, only the beginning of the dead code is reported.
• Revamp vulture's scavenging property by additional detection of the cases which render the code unreachable .
• Implement a confidence value with results - this would be necessary when implementing auto removal, as we would need a proportion of surety or certainty with which we report dead code.

You can find the detailed project proposal here: Auto-removal of dead code removal through vulture

I would love to hear feedback, please drop by a message on gitter or email me.

I am also documenting this experience in the form of a blog, please have a read here: https://rj722.tech

Cheers,

Rahul