detecting deprecated functions in C++

Question

In a C++ project documented with Doxygen, I have marked some functions as \deprecated in the Doxygen comments. Is there any way to use these comments (with Doxygen or another tool) in order to detect that another non-deprecated function is calling a deprecated one ? (The project is pretty big and going through all the classes would take a lot of time).

Thanks

Answer 1

If you are using GCC or clang to compile your code you could manually annotate functions.

__attribute__((__deprecated__))
void dep_fun() { }

Then calling dep_fun anywhere in your code will emit a diagnostic message.

If you placed doxygen's \deprecated annotation consistently you should be able to update the code automatically with tools like sed.