Resurrecting Herbie lints

For those who are unfamiliar, Herbie is a linter designed to catch and suggest fixes for floating-point expressions in order to make them more accurate. In the mists of the distant past, GitHub - mcarton/rust-herbie-lint: A rustc plugin to check for numerical instability was available as a compiler plugin, with the downside that it broke frequently due to its dependence on the nightly compiler, and has now been broken for several years.
As someone who writes a lot of floating-point expressions, and does not trust themselves to know what they're doing all the time, I would love to resurrect the Rust interface to Herbie. I gather that compiler plugins are no longer a thing, so here I am, asking whether:

A) anyone would like to work on this with me
B) anyone is interested in mentoring me in producing a linter, because I haven't had any sort of interaction with Rust's compilation toolchain as such, and have no idea where to start
C) this is the sort of thing that could be an optional add-on to Clippy, or something that works like Clippy, but is wholly separate.

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Sounds awesome to add 'into' Clippy rather!

Herbie is probably too big for Clippy. I am interested, but I probably can't help much.

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I don't know much about Clippy or Rust, but as the main Herbie developer, let me offer any guidance and support I can. I'm also happy to add new, more-machine-readable interfaces to Herbie if that would be useful.

2 Likes

That's very kind of you Pavel, thank you! I'll definitely be in touch when I've had a chance to actually start the project, and thanks for building such a useful tool.

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