rust-clippy/CONTRIBUTING.md
2017-05-23 13:19:16 +02:00

3.8 KiB

Contributing to rust-clippy

Hello fellow Rustacean! Great to see your interest in compiler internals and lints!

Getting started

All issues on Clippy are mentored, if you want help with a bug just ask @Manishearth or @llogiq.

Some issues are easier than others. The E-easy label can be used to find the easy issues. If you want to work on an issue, please leave a comment so that we can assign it to you!

Issues marked T-AST involve simple matching of the syntax tree structure, and are generally easier than T-middle issues, which involve types and resolved paths.

Issues marked E-medium are generally pretty easy too, though it's recommended you work on an E-easy issue first.

Llogiq's blog post on lints is a nice primer to lint-writing, though it does get into advanced stuff. Most lints consist of an implementation of LintPass with one or more of its default methods overridden. See the existing lints for examples of this.

T-AST issues will generally need you to match against a predefined syntax structure. To figure out how this syntax structure is encoded in the AST, it is recommended to run rustc -Z ast-json on an example of the structure and compare with the nodes in the AST docs. Usually the lint will end up to be a nested series of matches and ifs, like so.

T-middle issues can be more involved and require verifying types. The ty module contains a lot of methods that are useful, though one of the most useful would be expr_ty (gives the type of an AST expression). match_def_path() in Clippy's utils module can also be useful.

Compiling clippy can take almost a minute or more depending on your machine. You can set the environment flag CARGO_INCREMENTAL=1 to cut down that time to almost a third on average, depending on the influence your change has.

Clippy uses its own version of UI tests. Run cargo test examples to run only the ui tests. This will update all the *.stderr files in clippy_tests/examples. You need to check the stderr files whether they look as you expected them and commit them together with your changes. When you want to test a new lint, just create a new file in clippy_tests/examples and rerun cargo test examples.

You can check just one example by running cargo run --example example_name inside the clippy_tests directory.

Also please document your lint with a doc comment akin to the following:

/// **What it does:** Checks for ... (describe what the lint matches).
///
/// **Why is this bad?** Supply the reason for linting the code.
///
/// **Known problems:** None. (Or describe where it could go wrong.)
///
/// **Example:**
/// ```rust
/// Insert a short example if you have one.
/// ```

Our util/update_wiki.py script can then add your lint docs to the wiki.

Contributions

Clippy welcomes contributions from everyone.

Contributions to Clippy should be made in the form of GitHub pull requests. Each pull request will be reviewed by a core contributor (someone with permission to land patches) and either landed in the main tree or given feedback for changes that would be required.

All code in this repository is under the Mozilla Public License, 2.0

Conduct

We follow the Rust Code of Conduct.