Unleashing the Power of Clippy in Real-World Rust Projects

Chunmiao Li, Yijun Yu, Haitao Wu, Luca Carlig, Shijie Nie, Lingxiao Jiang

Abstract: The error messages generated by the Rust compiler (rustc) are useful for developers to identify and diagnose suspicious code segments. Complementing the compiler, linters can also play an important role in promoting the adherence to certain coding style conventions and best practices. Prominent linters utilized in the Rust ecosystem include Clippy [1] and Rustfmt [2]. Among them, the Rust community particularly emphasizes on the importance of heeding the warnings provided by Clippy to mitigate common errors and promote the adoption of idiomatic conventions. Clippy provides a set of more than 600 lints in addition to the built-in rustc lints. These lints are divided into nine distinct categories that address correctness and style aspects. Each category is assigned a default lint level, namely Allow, Warn, or Deny, indicating the severity with which the lints are reported.