clangd VS include-what-you-use

I know one way to do this, but hoping there's something simpler or more general. clangd (C++ LSP server) is over-aggressive about adding "helpful" #includes during completion. The way to turn that off is to pass -header-insertion=never on its cmd line.

Install the clangd language server using your system package manager, e.g. sudo apt-get install clangd

> As a side note, I despise things like imports and aliases. I'd prefer that when I do jump to a function, I can read it without having to check if anything is imported or not.

One idea might be to use an LSP (Language Server Protocol) interface. It could describe the fully qualified symbol for you when you, say, select the abbreviated symbol or press a keyboard shortcut. I've been working on a moderately large C program with Emacs and clangd[1] recently and have been amazed at how 'immersive' it feels, and that's from someone who's used to the comfort of a Lisp REPL!

[1]: https://clangd.llvm.org/

FWIW, recent clangd also has this feature: "unused" as of 14, "missing" as of 16, works better in snapshots.

You need to install CMake (and use it to build your project - which you should do in any case) and clangd.

First we would need the Clangd extension as well as the LSP itself You can download the extension from #here The extension provides its own Clangd LSP but in case of issues with that we would like to download and setup the clangd package from the official site for both Windows and Linux I daily drive Linux on my laptop, thus this guide works well for linux users, Windows users can use programs like Cygwin to replicate the process

Few days ago I found a bug while using clangd LSP with neovim, and submitted a bug report to clangd: https://github.com/clangd/clangd/issues/1640

Come to the light side: VSCodium with clangd

If you use the clangd LSP: https://github.com/clangd/clangd/issues

Overall I think it’s pretty good. Though I’ve found a nasty clangd bug might push me back to YCM. Though. I don’t recall this being a issue in my previous vim setup.

Interesting...how does it compare to https://github.com/include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use ?

Build Insights in Visual Studio, include-what-you-use).

Looks like https://include-what-you-use.org/ might do that.

If you are worried about includes, use https://github.com/include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use and stop thinking about it.

Getting rid of that is not straightforard, though some tools can help with that

You can use the tool https://github.com/include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use to do this for for. It tracks included files and can give comment for what is used from each file. It also warns you when you include files that you don’t use

Invisible imports (e.g. traits). In Python, everything is fully namespaced (unless you from import * in which case all bets are off). It's always explicit where a name is coming from. C is the opposite: #include lets you refer to anything defined in the headers with no namespacing. That's why a common strategy (include what you use) has an associated code style: after every non-std #include you have a comment saying which of its definitions you are using. Of course, Rust is much less implicit, but I still sometimes struggle with traits. For example, you can use tokio::net::TcpStream, but you need to also use tokio::io::AsyncReadExt for the .read trait to be defined on TcpStream. This makes it hard (for me) to answer questions like "what traits are currently available in this scope?" and "why is this module being imported?"

Aside from being closed source and not available on all architectures, how does it compare to iwyu(https://include-what-you-use.org/) or clang's relatively recent include-fixer which is also accessible via clangd?

I set up include-what-you-use and I let it tell me which headers should be where. The IWYU rules would have put all needed headers including in the cpp file.