Cleaning up Delphi code?

Question

Delphi

There is a large (several hundred thousand lines) project in Delphi that has been in development for about 10 years.
I believe that more than a dozen developers worked on it. Consequently, there you can see all sorts of manifestations of human stupidity, negligence, curvature and other unpleasant things.
I would like to comb this project a little, and automate this process as much as possible (because manually it can take more than one week). Namely:
- remove commented blocks of code
- remove code that is not linked into the executable
- remove unused uses
- remove pas / dfm files that do not belong to the project
- so that all previous actions are completely controlled
Well, various other goodies are also desirable, such as formatting the code according to a template, identifying potentially dangerous or simply suspicious places, etc. But cleaning the code (the above points) is a priority.

Answer 1

It won't work automatically.
Uses can not be deleted, starting with delphi 6, unnecessary ones are not connected.
Pas / dfm I deleted manually, everything that was not in the project file - then I returned the necessary ones.
I don’t advise formatting to one view - then it’s very difficult to compare changes.

Answer 2

It is better with pens, it is written quickly, you can adjust it optimally for yourself. It is better to use ready-made engines / components for parsing delphi code (there are many of them, many are available without problems) and convenient control in the future. Look at torry.net.
Although there are a number of non-trivial tasks (for example, coverage assessment), which are better solved with ready-made tools (for example, the AQTime trial), in order to save time. Although this can be solved by yourself.
But after a couple of days, you will get a solution, which, IMHO, is not ashamed to post in public and help many in the future :)

Answer 3

But because it was necessary to use VCS. And in general ... The current state of Delphi resembles the "convulsions of a dying rhino" (c)

Answer 4

Refactoring a large project can drag on for many months, do you need it? Can only refactor potentially buggy, slow sections, in order to visually optimize the work?

Answer 5

For formatting, I advise GExperts (Experimental).
For everything else, CnPack Wizards should be fine.

Answer 6

For formatting, it's better to use DelForEx, as
far as I remember, cleaning of uses is possible in CnPack
, but deleting commented code is easy to do with any editor that supports regular expressions. For example, use a search in GExperts for \(\*.*\*\) and when the results appear, replace it with an empty string (there is a replace all items item),
it is best to remove unused code with specialized software. AQTime was already given here above, I can also advise Pascal Analyzer
but in general, refactoring is a long, tedious and difficult to automate task

Answer 7

In my opinion, it is better not to touch the commented blocks - in the future it will be easier to track the history of changes, while they do not affect the final size of the application.