diff --git a/content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/index.md b/content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/index.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..a6c8da241 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/index.md @@ -0,0 +1,59 @@ ++++ +path = "inside-rust/2025/10/22/clippys-feature-warming-up" +title = "What we learned with Clippy's feature freeze" +authors = ["blyxyas"] + +[extra] +team = "the Clippy team" +team_url = "https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/dev-tools#team-clippy" ++++ + + +The [feature freeze affecting Clippy][feature-freeze] has reached its end date. This means that the Clippy project has been accepting pull +requests that add new features (and new lints) for a while. + +The Clippy team has reviewed the results, and we can say that it's been a success 🎉. It has been so great that we managed +to create an all-time peak in the number of pull requests opened in a week. + +In this plot we can observe that peak (the red lines mark the start and end of the feature freeze) + +![Plot of PRs per week, we can see an all-time peak when the feature freeze happens](/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/prs_per_week.png) + +After some data crunching of those pull requests opened after June 26th, we had 18 pull requests open in that period +that added lints. With 326 pull requests open by both new and old contributors, we want to highlight all the new people +that started contributing to Clippy, 47 new contributors who opened a total of 195 pull requests. + +On a team meeting, we concluded that the results of the feature freeze were positive enough to warrant a future one. +The cadence and duration of these is still being decided. + +58% of all pull requests by new contributors (114 out of the total 195) were opened by the same person. We held a meeting with her ([ada4a] on Github) to iron out some of the details of +the codebase and our procedures for new contributors. We are currently analyzing that meeting in order to improve +the experience for future and current contributors. + +We also asked some questions to Ada (ada4a) to include as a mini Q&A, here are some of the answers. + +## Ada's Q&A + +> Why do you like contributing to Clippy? What's so fun about it? + +I came to enjoy improving the suggestions that Clippy makes: they are +fascinating in how they point out the exact part of code that is +problematic, and show the (sometimes pretty complex) manipulations required to +fix it. Also, It has been empowering to learn the machinery behind the +compiler, and use that knowledge to refine these diagnostics even further. + +> Would you recommend contributing to Clippy? Why or why not? + +Yes, for multiple reasons: +- Rust is (in)famously hard to learn, and to me, Clippy is one of the parts of the +toolchain most helpful for beginners, as it teaches idiomatic style and helps +discover helpful functions from std -- thus, contributing to it helps reduce the +entry barrier of the language. +- If you, like me, wanted to learn the inner workings of the compiler and contribute +to it some day, but were intimidated by the [development setup required for that][rustc-dev-guide], +Clippy could be a nice stepping stone, as hacking on it doesn't require compiling +rustc, but it interacts with a lot of compiler's data structures and APIs. + +[rustc-dev-guide]: https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/building/how-to-build-and-run.html +[ada4a]: https://github.com/ada4a +[feature-freeze]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2025/06/21/announcing-the-clippy-feature-freeze/ diff --git a/content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/prs_per_week.png b/content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/prs_per_week.png new file mode 100644 index 000000000..349ee5643 Binary files /dev/null and b/content/inside-rust/clippy-warming-up/prs_per_week.png differ