flowistry VS Clippy

https://github.com/willcrichton/flowistry https://github.com/cognitive-engineering-lab/aquascope

Hello Rustaceans, the same lab that has brought you The Rust Book Experiment, Aquascope, and Flowistry is starting a new endeavor. We want to understand when Rust's trait system makes it hard for you to understand or debug a Rust program.

I'm personally excited about building developer tools with a sophisticated understanding of your Rust programs. So I've worked on tools like Flowistry and Aquascope.

Maybe this vscode extension could be useful to you?

Maybe you would be interested in flowistry?

Quick, easy formal verification tools that programmers can use on the spot from the IDE are hard to make for most languages because most languages and their compilers weren't made with such thing in mind.

I guess Rust might be heading somewhere interesting with tooling, with tools like Flowistry existing (https://github.com/willcrichton/flowistry) showing what is possible. It's a plugin that can compute backwards / forwards static slices for you, straight in the IDE as a VSCode plugin. I think you need an external program that runs a full program analysis to do the same in C++.

Based on how Flowistry works I think this should be possible.

I couldn't find it in the API guidelines either. From what I understand, the idea is that any trait bounds, which includes generic type parameter bounds and lifetime bound on a type (struct or enum) would be repeated back in the impl block

there is a nice discussion on this issue here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/1689

You should not blindly follow clippy lints. They are sometimes wrong. Another example https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/9782 .

I often write () = f() to assert that f() is unit. Unfortunately clippy warns on such code ( https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy/issues/9048 ). There are very recent pull requests for this bug, so hopefully this bug will be fixed very soon. But meanwhile I invented this workaround: [()] = [f()] :)

Apart from running clippy on many projects being essential, clippy is also an exceptionally welcoming project, no matter your prior knowledge.

clippy is a great place to get started :) though it isn't exactly new.

clippy is also pretty compiler-adjacent and unlike rust-analyzer uses rustc's internal APIs. Don't let the size of the code base scare you off! It's actually feasible for a newcomer to contribute even such a substantial change as a new lint, and we have issues labeled as "good first issue" that come with mentorship, so you don't need to go it alone.

Yes, you could use it to write a lint. Although you might find it easier to just fork Clippy and add your own lints to their existing framework.

Check out the readme for more information.

They are two of my favorite Rust tools. If you haven’t tried them yet, I highly recommend giving them a try. Clippy can detect various lints in your code and guide you towards writing more idiomatic code. To install Clippy, simply run rustup component add clippy, and to run it within your workspace, execute cargo clippy. For more details, visit Clippy’s GitHub repository.