rust-lang / rust-lang/rust-clippy
lint for unused crates
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 13.5k
- Forks
- 2.2k
- Avg merge
- 2d 10h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 32
Description
It's pretty common for crates listed in Cargo.toml to become unused over time. I don't know of a tool that can figure this out, but it definitely needs the help of rustc. Clippy is in a position to figure this out. rustc should be able to track whether any names from a crate explicitly loaded by rustc are actually used and report when none are.
cc @siddontang
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by investigating how rustc tracks names from explicitly loaded crates and how Clippy could expose that information as a lint. Use the dependency entries in Cargo.toml as the user-facing context; done should mean reporting a crate whose names are never used, with the behavior and diagnostic scope defined before implementation.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- compilers, tooling
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100