How to setup Vim LSP plugins to use clangd on a Visual C++ project (msbuild, cl.exe)?

Question

How do you setup clangd as an lsp when using a project not built with clang?

It's giving really basic lint errors like unknown type name 'uint8_t' because it's failing to process my precompiled headers. And completion mostly doesn't work.

Answer 1

clangd wants a compile_commands.json file. I found the Sourcetrail Extension for Visual Studio will generate compile_commands.json:

As a Clang based tool Sourcetrail supports the JSON Compilation Database format for simplified project setup. This extension enables you to generate a JSON Compilation Database from your Visual Studio projects and solutions.

Install that extension, restart visual studio, and then Sourcetrail > Create Compilation Database, then Select All, and click Create.

That cleared up a lot of my linting errors, and I sometimes get good completion results with omnifunc=lsp#complete. Sometimes I get nothing.

I think compile_commands.json needs to be regularly regenerated since it lists compilation commands for each file. I wish there was an easy way to automate this step.

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I'm using several plugins for lsp and linting support:

• vim-lsp
• vim-lsp-settings
• vim-lsp-ale
• ale