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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

We definitely have plans to get clippy working on stable Rust; though I will say, with clippy, using nightly is less of a big deal, since it's not something you depend on, it's a tool you use.

> if I could configure cargo to only use nightly Rust when invoking clippy,

This is

    rustup run nightly cargo clippy

    cargo +nightly clippy

if you have rustup installed.

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Hey steve,

Using clippy is not as straightforward as you put it because clippy and the latest nightly often are broken together. There would be much less hassle if it was a stable crate. Also no worries of backwards compatibility between stable/nightly.

- rg

That's totally fair; I've gotten lucky, I think, with the mis-matches. As mentioned, we certainly want to ship a "known good" one to address exactly what you're talking about, but until then, it's not _super_ onerous to use, IMHO.

To be clear, clippy can't ever be a true "stable" crate. What clippy does is rely on a whole ton of compiler internals so that it does not have to reimplement the compiler. These internals change, because the rust compiler is under active development.

The plan for "stable" clippy is to bundle it with releases, precompiled. It will still use the internal APIs, but from a user's perspective they just have to `rustup component add clippy` and it will magically work.

`rustup component add clippy`

Whoa, that's the first I've heard about this. Very exciting plans!

Ballpark ETA on being able to install a precompiled clippy with rustup like that?

It's "phase 2" of https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/rust-ci-release-infrastruc...

We've got a good idea of how it will happen, but the infra stuff has to happen first -- nobody wants to complicate the existing infra if it's going to go away.

I don't have a clear timeline on that. A few months I guess.

On clippy's side we don't need many changes to make this work.

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