[cfe-dev] clangd, completion in header files

[Jan Včelák via cfe-dev]

Thank you all for the responses.

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 10:22 AM, Sam McCall wrote:
> Yeah, this is a known missing feature - guessing the right compile flags for
> headers.
> If you have a compilation database (e.g. compile_commands.json) that
> provides compile commands for headers, then clangd works as expected.
> However most build systems don't provide this information. (Bazel, for one,
> does).

I see. That makes perfect sense. We use cmake which doesn't export
compile commands for headers unfortunately.

> When there's no compile command provided, we fall back to 'clang $filename'.
> Clang treats .h files as C.
> But it's also missing a bunch of other information: include paths, defines
> etc that are likely required to get useful results.
> So I don't think just diverging from clang here will actually help many
> projects (feel free to try this out by editing compile_commands.json - if
> this works for you it'd be good to know).

I have tried adding a compile_commands.json entry for a header with
flags matching the cpp file. The headers were recognized as C++
because the former errors on keywords like namespace were gone but
something was still wrong. Some STL declarations were not found -
std::shared_ptr for instance. Running the compiler command from
terminal showed 'clang-6.0: warning: treating 'c-header' input as
'c++-header' when in C++ mode, this behavior is deprecated
[-Wdeprecated]' which made me try adding '-x c++'. That fixed the
remaining problem but it's strange as the code was already recognized
as C++ and the command contains explicit -std=c++14 option.

> What can we do then? A few ideas:

There are some good suggestions. I'm sure you will find some good
default and I'm looking forward to try it out. I can just confirm that
the heuristic used by YouCompleteMe is quite nice because that's what
I've been using so far. It's not optimal but it works reasonably well.

Cheers,

Jan