Lint

Overview

clice integrates clang-tidy as a built-in linting engine. clice lint runs the checks of your .clang-tidy over the workspace's translation units with a resident worker pool and prints one merged report.

Usage: clice lint [--workspace <dir>] [--configuration <tag>] [--workers <n>] [--index]

Runs clang-tidy over every translation unit of the compilation database that the lint set below admits, prints the merged findings, and exits non-zero when problems are found. --index additionally builds and persists the project index from the same parses, so a follow-up clice index run has nothing left to do.

Exit codes: 0 for a clean run, 1 when there are findings, 2 when the run could not complete as asked: a translation unit failed to run or the index could not be persisted. An interrupted run exits with 130.

What is checked

• Every translation unit the compilation database lists, inside the workspace.
• Every header inside the workspace that the checked units include, subject to the .clang-tidy header filters (HeaderFilterRegex, ExcludeHeaderFilterRegex, SystemHeaders), read exactly as clang-tidy reads them.
• Files outside the workspace are never checked, whether or not the build marks them as system headers. A rule in clice.toml with lint = false keeps matching files inside the workspace out as well, for example a vendored library:

[[rules]]
patterns = ["third_party/**"]
lint = false

Each translation unit takes its configuration from the nearest .clang-tidy, with the inheritance clang-tidy applies. NOLINT, NOLINTNEXTLINE and NOLINTBEGIN/NOLINTEND comments are honored in every file. A header is checked in every translation unit that includes it, as clang-tidy would; a finding several units report identically, notes included, appears once in the report, which is sorted by file and position and keeps the notes clang-tidy attaches.

clang-tidy Integration Quality

Issues that affect the quality of clang-tidy diagnostics within a language server:

• Suppress clang-tidy warnings from macros in system headers (clangd#1587, clangd#2000)
• Run checks on preprocessor directives in preamble (header guards, macros) (clangd#2501, clangd#160)
• Configurable diagnostic severity per check category (clangd#1937)
• Support loading clang-tidy plugins (clangd#1458)
• Clang static analyzer support (clangd#905)
• Clean up replacements when applying clang-tidy fixes (clangd#429)
• Filter diagnostics by version control diff (clangd#822)
• NOLINT / NOLINTNEXTLINE / NOLINTBEGIN-END comment suppression
• Diagnostics.ClangTidy configuration in .clangd config
• Fast-check filtering for clang-tidy performance
• Fix-it suggestions from clang-tidy as code actions
• Diagnostic metadata: check name, documentation URL, source tag