D Language Foundation May 2026 Monthly Meeting Summary

[Johan]

On Tuesday, 11 August 2026 at 13:13:22 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>
> ### `pragma(lint)` and linting
>  [...]
> If there were a plug-in architecture where individuals and 
> companies could add their own linting features, that seemed 
> fine. The question remained whether it should be done via a 
> pragma or a UDA.

LDC has plugin capability for this exact purpose. And it's used, 
I believe with great success, at Weka. See Luis's linter: 
https://github.com/ljmf00/ldclint
and have a look at the tests for examples of what it does.

If you want to pursue something akin to this, I strongly 
recommend to discuss Luis's experience with it.

> Martin said that implementing linting through plugins would be 
> tricky, especially
> on Windows. Anyone who had played with D shared libraries knew 
> that a plugin would
> need to use the same host compiler that had built the compiler 
> itself. If the
> plugin needed to share the GC with the compiler, then the 
> compiler would likely
> need to be built with a shared DRuntime. That was all messy.

What's more, the AST API and ABI are very unstable, changing with 
each dmd version. So you have to recompile/match the plugin for 
each new compiler version anyway. It's not a big problem, but it 
is an annoyance.
LDC provides the `ldc-build-plugin` tool to deal with the plugin 
build trickery, but IIRC it is still giving linker issues with 
Luis's ldclint on macOS.

Regardless, I still believe LDC's plugin capability has been very 
useful and has helped catch very hard-to-spot bugs.

Example:
```
struct BadAligned
{
     // Warning: Variable `p` is misaligned and contains pointers. 
Use `@nogc` to be explicit.
     align(1) int* p;
}
```

cheers,
   Johan