[llvm-dev] clang-tidy makes review a pain

[Maxim Kazantsev via llvm-dev]

I'm talking about the case when it's working as intended, but because of this, the reviewer has to claw through the debris of these tidy comments trying to pull code pieces together. It's more about perception than about correctness of the automation.

--Max

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron Ballman <aaron at aaronballman.com> 
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2021 6:17 PM
To: Maxim Kazantsev <mkazantsev at azul.com>
Cc: llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: Re: [llvm-dev] clang-tidy makes review a pain

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 5:43 AM Maxim Kazantsev via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I started noticing that lately we’ve improved reporting from clang-tidy, pointing out at various formatting issues. However the more verbose it becomes, the more annoyed I feel about it. For example here:
>
> https://reviews.llvm.org/D100721

FWIW, all of those diagnostics in the review are correct and are items you should fix. Having an automated tool tell you about them means that reviewers have less work to do and the code base is more likely to end up in a more consistent stylistic state. Having that information earlier rather than later (such as at patch acceptance) means less work for code reviewers, who are sometimes already pretty taxed. That's the whole point to having clang-tidy and clang-format integrated into CI.

> It complains literally about every second line, inserting its comments straight into review. They take as much space as the actual code. Maybe it’s just me, but it’s really hard to me to understand what the patch is actually doing with so many inlined auto-generated comments. Maybe there is a button to hide them somewhere, but I failed to find it.
>
> I understand what was the intention, and clang-tidy is a cool thing in general, but it’s getting too intrusive. Does anyone else have the same problem as I do? If there’s a lot of people whom it annoys, maybe we should think how to make it less invasive. Maybe it should put these comment when the patch gets approved, or something like this.

I've complained about the verbosity of clang-tidy and clang-format checks in reviews before, but my concerns come from diagnostics like clang-format not being found on PATH (not something the code author or the reviewer can do anything about), confusion with Phabricator's stacked patches (where clang-tidy will complain about unknown or missing methods that exist in a parent patch but not in the child patch), or clang-format trying to format things it shouldn't (tablegen files, test cases, unit tests, etc).

However, as a reviewer, I think the comments in the review you linked are a demonstration of the functionality working as-designed how I'd want it to work.

~Aaron

>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Max
>
>
>
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