[cfe-dev] How to use clang-tidy for smaller projects

[Jonathan Coe via cfe-dev]

I wonder if enough of clang tidy functionality is exposed through libclang and python that you could do some clang-tidy-lite work with python tooling?

I had some success extending libclang to power a language bindings generator (like SWIG)

> On 26 Oct 2019, at 14:13, Robert Underwood via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> All, 
> 
> tl;dr is there a way to use clang-tidy for small projects without requiring users to rebuild most of clang/llvm provided versions match? 
> 
> Let me begin by offering my gratitude to the Clang/LLVM community for the excellent C/C++ tools you all develop and we all benefit from. 
> 
> I'm a grad student who works on a number of small libraries that use C/C++, and occasionally me or my colleagues change the APIs for those libraries, and would like to provide tools to update to the new APIs to our users.  As I understand there are two main options: 
> 
> 1. Write a new custom clang-tool to do the migrations 
> 
> 2. Reuse clang-tidy and write a new tidy-module or add our check to an existing module. 
> 
> The former has some disadvantages: it means that users now need to run our tool and clang-tidy to get all of the fixes they need. Additionally what we are doing with the migrations are essentially what clang-tidy was designed to do. 
> 
> The latter addresses these challenges, but presents a few more. Now users have to compile and install a custom version of clang-tidy in order to use our checks, and for various reasons the user probably will compile and install a fair bit of the clang/llvm ecosystem just to try our migration modules. LLVM/clang/clang-tools-extra are not small projects and take a while to compile and occupy substantial disk space once compiled for a task like this. 
> 
> I considered trying to write a module external to the LLVM/Clang source tree and just link to the appropriate libraries in as I have done with clang-tools in the past, but clang-tidy uses several implementation specific headers that are not available outside the clang-tools-extra source code repository (i.e. ClangTidy.h).  I recognize that this is not the [recommended method for developing clang-tidy modules][1] so it doesn't surprise me that this does not work. 
> 
> However, I think there is a use case here.  Not every project is backed by Google, Intel, Apple, Sony, or another large company with an extensive distributed build environment where rebuilding a large amount of clang/llvm is more feasible.  Not every clang-tidy module needs to be up-streamed to clang-tidy especially those for small libraries like mine. 
> 
> I admit it is quite possible I am missing something, but I think there should be a way to make this easier for small projects to use.  I've read the provided documentation several times, and I've not found it. 
> 
> I would appreciate your time and consideration as you consider this request. 
> 
> Respectfully, 
> 
> Robert Underwood 
> 
> 
> [1]: https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/Contributing.html 
> 
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