Question

I was wondering if there is a quick and effective way to remove all the unused variables (local, instance, even properties) in xcode… I am doing a code cleanup on my app and if I knew a quick way for code refactoring it would help me a lot…

Thanks…

Answer 1

It’s being a long time since you made your question and maybe you found an answer already, but from an answer to a related question:

For static analysis, I strongly
recommend the Clang Static Analyzer
(which is happily built into Xcode 3.2
on Snow Leopard). Among all its other
virtues, this tool can trace code
paths an identify chunks of code that
cannot possibly be executed, and
should either be removed or the
surrounding code should be fixed so
that it can be called.

For dynamic analysis, I use gcov (with
unit testing) to identify which code
is actually executed. Coverage reports
(read with something like CoverStory)
reveal un-executed code, which —
coupled with manual examination and
testing — can help identify code that
may be dead. You do have to tweak some
setting and run gcov manually on your
binaries. I used this blog post to get
started.

Both methodologies are exactly for what you want, detecting unused code (both variables and methods) and removing them.