clangd previously enjoyed having four active maintainers to spread responsibilities around for performing code reviews, issue triage, RFCs, etc. Unfortunately, during the latest maintainer refresh, three of those maintainers had to step away and the fourth has limited bandwidth particularly for review activities.
This leaves clangd dangerously close to being unmaintained with a significant backlog of open PRs and open issues, which puts it at risk of eventual removal from the project unless we can find more folks who are willing to take on maintainer responsibilities for it.
This is an important offering and I think we as a community would like to continue to support it. So if you are an active contributor to clangd and would be interested in taking on those responsibilities, please speak up! If you have questions or concerns, feel free to raise them here or reach out privately.
Could this be at risk because nobody from clangd side will be able to review a large feature in short period of time (including RFC, code patches, etc…).
Maybe interested parties from that gsoc project could become next maintainers?
Hi. I’d be happy to review clangd-related PRs as much as my time allows. I’m not sure I’ll be able to sort out existing PRs, but I’ll try to review new ones.I’m somewhat familiar with the clangd codebase and am running an internal fork
Thank you! Normally I’d recommend not doing any GSoC work with clangd due to questions of whether there’s sufficient mentorship. However. the current HLSL maintainer (@beanz) is one of the recently-former clangd maintainers, so that GSoC project might still be reasonable. But yeah, folks interested in helping with that GSoC project as mentors would be great candidates for maintainers for clangd.
It may be reasonable to announce that tools in limited maintenance mode in Release Notes. May be some users in corporate world could allocate some resources or sponsor development. My company uses it but it’s not in vanilla software business anymore and not as big as Google, Apple, etc.
Having played around with AI code review agents specifically for LLVM reviews, these are unlikely to improve review bandwidth, at least in their current state.
The bottleneck from what I’ve seen in most reviews is gaining an appropriate understanding of the change being made. I do not find AI agents helpful for that.
People can also already request reviews from Copilot given that’s built in to Github.
At our company, I’m responsible for everything related to llvm. We have a dozen changes on top of clangd to fit our needs. I am already trying to help out from time to time, mainly with reviewing on the vs code extension. This during my spare time, as I’m not backed by my company on this. My availability is low (+/- 1 day a month) and will be even lower in the next few months as our family will get expanded soon.
It would really be a pity if clangd would become unmaintained. I see many people recommending it as the best LSP for C++ in VS Code. (And I agree)