[WIP]Memory Ownership Annotations

[PengZheng]

Description

This pull request focuses on improving code clarity and consistency. The changes include:

• Adding memory ownership annotations to improve code documentation and enable better static analysis.
• Standardizing function declarations by explicitly including void in parameter lists for consistency.
• Introducing the CELIX_HAS_ATTRIBUTE macro to check for attribute support.
• Improved Formatting and Grammar: Fixed typos, improved clarity in comments, and ensured consistency in phrasing following CLion's suggestions.

Usage

Enable the following clang-tidy checks to see its effects:

• clang-analyzer-unix.DynamicMemoryModeling
• clang-analyzer-unix.Malloc
• clang-analyzer-unix.MallocSizeof
• clang-analyzer-unix.MismatchedDeallocator

Both vscode and Clion IDE have good integrations with clang-tidy.

Limitations

• Clang Static Analyzer does not model cleanup attribute properly, see [analyzer] Explicit Return and __attribute__((cleanup(..))) llvm/llvm-project#160527
• ownership_returns can only be used to mark functions returning their allocations through return values, i.e., output parameter is not supported, see [analyzer] Extend ownership_returns attribute to cover output parameters llvm/llvm-project#166122

The first issue leads to lots of false-positives, which can fortunately be suppressed using NOLINT macros. I will try to fix both issues in the Clang upstream.

[codecov-commenter]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 91.47%. Comparing base (6418698) to head (245a3a2).

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master     #806      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   91.52%   91.47%   -0.06%     
==========================================
  Files         236      236              
  Lines       29561    28818     -743     
==========================================
- Hits        27057    26361     -696     
+ Misses       2504     2457      -47     

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[pnoltes]

Nice PR. I was not aware that this is possible and this looks like a good addition to make the code more readable and even more when using clang-tidy.

Should we also add clang-tidy to our CI?

For the usage of '(void)' for an explicit empty argument list, maybe this should also be added to our coding conventions documentation.

And ideally when to use 'CELIX_OWNERSHIP_RETURNS', '_TAKES' and ' _HOLDS' should also be documented.

[PengZheng]

Should we also add clang-tidy to our CI?

Yes.

For the usage of '(void)' for an explicit empty argument list, maybe this should also be added to our coding conventions documentation.

And ideally when to use 'CELIX_OWNERSHIP_RETURNS', '_TAKES' and ' _HOLDS' should also be documented.

I am currently working on fixing the cleanup attributes modeling issue, and will follow the above suggestions once it's done.