refex VS Bear

As someone who worked on a similar tool (https://github.com/ssbr/refex/tree/main/refex/fix/fixers, I did a bunch of the work to prep this for open-sourcing, though I think all my contributions are hidden behind the "Google-internal" anonymization), having auto-applied or auto-appliable fixers like this is super useful.

They can be auto-applied by post-commit (e.g. a generic `git fixcommit` style command that runs all the relevant lint tools and fixes them in the working copy, letting you review before push), or applied during code review (automatic comments with a "click here to apply fix" interface), both of which are nice.

Plus the same underlying tooling can be used to write more complex one-off fixes that may be used for migrations or cleanups.

You might like Refex, which automates AST transformations like this:

There's lots of confusion about what semgrep does here, which is kind of unfortunate. I haven't touched it much, but I have built a very similar tool (I'm one of the contributors to refex[1], which is a very similar project).

The starting point of semantic grep is very useful. When you have a big codebase, you often want to detect antipatterns, or not even antipatterns, but just uses of a thing, say you're renaming a method and want to track down the callers.

Being able to act on the AST, instead of hoping you searched up all of the variants of whitespace and line breaks and, depending on the specific example, different uses of argument passing, is really useful.

But often when you're semantically grepping, your goal is to replace something with something else (this is what refex was initially built for: to aide in large scale changes in python, as a sort of equivalent to the C++ tools that Google uses).

But then you want to shift left even further: once you have a pattern that you want to replace once, you can just enforce that a linter yell at you when anyone does it again. So it's very natural to develop a linter-style thing on top of one of these[2].

This is, as I understand it sort of the same thing that happens in C++: clang-tidy and clang-format are written on top of AST libraries that can be used for ad-hoc analysis and transformations, but you can also just plug them into a linter.

The thing is, for most organizations, enforcing code style and best practices is more valuable than apply a refactoring to 10M lines of code, because most organizations don't have 10M lines of code to refactor. That doesn't mean that these tools aren't also useful for ad-hoc transforms and exploratory analysis. They absolutely are!

[1]: https://github.com/ssbr/refex

[2]: https://github.com/ssbr/refex/tree/main/refex/fix

Have you tried Bear? I used it for several projects and overall it works very well.

An update: I am now able to make everything work by generating `compile_commands.json` using compiledb. I'm aware that there is another tool Bear but for some reason it generates an empty `compile_commands.json` file for me.

Try https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

Regarding the libraries, you might need to add it to clangd’s configuration. A convenient way is to have a compile_commands.json in your project (this is generated by some build tools like CMake, but if you don’t use them, have a look at bear).

Note that you need to have a compile_commands.json file. That file can easily be generated by CMake, Meson, etc. For other build systems checkout Bear https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

make a 'gcc' command/executable that do nothing and make it first in your PATH and then run bear with make: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear/issues/219 It is unfortunate that bear doesn't catch the output of the make command with '--dry-run' as it still prints the compile commands, it seems not that hard to support this and I think many ppl would benefit..

You could try to start with Bear: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear In worst cases, I had to use strace to catch every gcc/g++ invocation and restructure the compile_commands.json out of the strace logs.

But it sounds like maybe you’re assuming for the purposes of using something like clangd (highly recommended for coding in cpp projects in general, you want to be using this in vscode or whatever else anyway, codelion notwithstanding I suppose) with neovim on a c++ project that you have to use cmake to produce a compilation database to use with neovim plugins (e.g. clangd via nvim-lsp et. al.). In this case, be aware that the https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear tool is a handy way to just tack it on to whatever command you’re using to run a c++ code build step, and it will give you a compile_commands.json, corresponding to the compiler commands it invoked, on a silver platter.

I guess your questionmarks are about installing "bear", he refers to this project: https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear

You just simply go to the root of your project, use bear and just open your C files. That's all.