include-what-you-use/CONTRIBUTING.md

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Instructions for developers

Submitting patches

We welcome patches and rely on your contributions to make IWYU smarter.

Coding and testing guidelines are available in the IWYU Coding Style guide.

Use GitHub's pull request system to submit change requests to the include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use repo.

It's usually a good idea to run ideas by the IWYU mailing list to get general agreement on directions before you start hacking.

Running the tests

If fixing a bug in IWYU, please add a test to the test suite! You can create a file called whatever.cc (not .cpp), and, if necessary, whatever.h, and whatever-<extension>.h. You may be able to get away without adding any .h files, and just including direct.h -- see, for instance, tests/remove_fwd_decl_when_including.cc.

To run the IWYU tests, run

python run_iwyu_tests.py

It runs one test for each .cc file in the tests/ directory. (We have additional tests in more_tests/, but have not yet gotten the testing framework set up for those tests.) The test runner searches for IWYU in the system PATH by default.

The output can be a bit hard to read, but if a test fails, the reason why will be listed after the ERROR:root:Test failed for xxx line.

You can select individual tests by listing their filename without extension as arguments

python run_iwyu_tests.py array macro_location

If you don't want to modify your PATH you can specify which IWYU executable to use for testing

python run_iwyu_tests.py -- ./include-what-you-use

(put any test names before '--' and the IWYU path after.)

When fixing fix_includes.py, add a test case to fix_includes_test.py and run

python fix_includes_test.py

Debugging

It's possible to run include-what-you-use in gdb, to debug that way. Another useful tool -- especially in combination with gdb -- is to get the verbose include-what-you-use output. See iwyu_output.h for a description of the verbose levels. Level 7 is very verbose -- it dumps basically the entire AST as it's being traversed, along with IWYU decisions made as it goes -- but very useful for that:

env IWYU_VERBOSE=7 make -k CXX=/path/to/llvm/Debug+Asserts/bin/include-what-you-use 2>&1 > /tmp/iwyu.verbose

A quick tour of the codebase

The codebase is strewn with TODOs of known problems, and also language constructs that aren't adequately tested yet. So there's plenty to do! Here's a brief guide through the codebase:

  • iwyu.cc: the main file, it includes the logic for deciding when a symbol has been 'used', and whether it's a full use (definition required) or forward-declare use (only a declaration required). It also includes the logic for following uses through template instantiations.
  • iwyu_driver.cc: responsible for creating and configuring a Clang compiler from command-line arguments.
  • iwyu_output.cc: the file that translates from 'uses' into IWYU violations. This has the logic for deciding if a use is covered by an existing #include (or is a built-in). It also, as the name suggests, prints the IWYU output.
  • iwyu_preprocessor.cc: handles the preprocessor directives, the #includes and #ifdefs, to construct the existing include-tree. This is obviously essential for include-what-you-use analysis. This file also handles the IWYU pragma-comments.
  • iwyu_include_picker.cc: this finds canonical #includes, handling private->public mappings (like bits/stl_vector.h -> vector) and symbols with multiple possible #includes (like NULL). Additional mappings are maintained in a set of .imp files separately, for easier per-platform/-toolchain customization.
  • iwyu_cache.cc: holds the cache of instantiated templates (may hold other cached info later). This is data that is expensive to compute and may be used more than once.
  • iwyu_globals.cc: holds various global variables. We used to think globals were bad, until we saw how much having this file simplified the code...
  • iwyu_*_util(s).h and .cc: utility functions of various types. The most interesting, perhaps, is iwyu_ast_util.h, which has routines that make it easier to navigate and analyze the clang AST. There are also some STL helpers, string helpers, filesystem helpers, etc.
  • iwyu_verrs.cc: debug logging for IWYU.
  • port.h: shim header for various non-portable constructs.
  • iwyu_getopt.cc: portability shim for GNU getopt(_long). Custom getopt(_long) implementation for Windows.
  • fix_includes.py: the helper script that edits a file based on the IWYU recommendations.