Clang-Tidy Checks for Abseil

By Deanna Garcia and Hugo Gonzalez, Abseil Interns

Abseil wants to help developers avoid common mistakes unique to our collection of libraries. Therefore, we have developed a set of clang-tidy checks for Abseil, allowing you to catch these errors early on before they become bigger problems.

Clang-Tidy) is a useful tool to help developers write C++ code in a correct and efficient manner. Clang-Tidy now supports a set of Abseil checks designed to diagnose and fix typical programming errors specific to Abseil including:

• Compatibility guideline violations
• Style violations
• Interface misuse
• Bugs that can be deduced via static analysis

We hope that these checks will help projects that depend on Abseil have high standards of code quality.

Our checks can be found on llvm’s clang-tools-extra repository, in the clang-tidy/abseil directory. The following checks have been released:

• Duration Division Check
• Faster StrSplit Delimiter Check
• No Internal Dependencies Check
• No Namespace Check
• Redundant StrCat Calls Check
• StrCat-Append Check
• String Find Starts with Check

For more information, consult Abseil’s Clang-Tidy Check Guide.

You can also write your own checks and share them with the Abseil community. For more information on clang-tidy, and if you are interested in learning more to get involved in writing your own Abseil clang-tidy checks, consult the Clang-Tidy documentation.