The clang-tidy tool

In this section, we will present clang-tidy as an example of a LibTooling tool and explain how to use it. All other Clang tools will have a similar look and feel, thereby allowing you to comfortably explore them.

The clang-tidy tool is a linter, based on Clang. In general, a linter is a tool that analyzes code and denounces parts that do not follow best practices. It can check for specific characteristics, such as the following:

• Whether the code will be portable across different compilers

• If the code follows a specific idiom or code convention

• If the code may lead to a bug due to abuse of a dangerous language feature

In the specific case of clang-tidy, the tool is able to run two types of checkers: those from the original Clang Static Analyzer and those specially written for clang-tidy. Despite being able to run static analyzer checks, notice that clang-tidy and other LibTooling-based tools are based on source code analysis, and that this is quite different from the elaborated...